Once again, having a low birth rate is the opposite of overcrowding.
Yes. That makes low birth rate a good thing for people in an overcrowded country like Japan. It would be a good thing for Germany to never get that crowded.
The discussion has nothing to do with overcrowding. It is a discussion of the distribution of the ages of people in the population.
If there are eight workers for everyone who is retired the payroll taxes for the eight workers will be lower than if there are only two workers for everyone who is retired.
The US birth rate is lower than 2.099, it is 1.86.
In the first place, that's almost certainly a temporary phenomenon, a consequence of mainstream culture no longer pressuring women to have babies they don't want. It just means subcultures that breed faster than this will become a higher fraction of the population and the rate will pop back up over a period of generations. If that doesn't happen because all the subcultures somehow participate in the drop, ...
Of course, one of the many reasons that the birth rate has dropped is because women want to pursue their careers and that few fathers aren't willing to abandon their careers. But the main reason is that the cost of raising a child in the developed countries is high, meaning that couples are having fewer children. And these factors are the same for the subcultures, most tend to limit the number of children that they have in the second and third generations in a developed country.
It any of these factors might be temporary, but it hasn't been in Japan.
... then genes for wanting babies whether you're being pressured or not will just become more prevalent.
This approaches babbling. I need some more explanation before I can accept the "Theory of Yearning Genes."
In the second place, the replacement fertility rate is a function of the sex ratio. If average women against all odds continue to only want 1.86 babies in the long term, that's nothing that can't be dealt with simply by making 86 baby boys per 100 baby girls. Sperm sorting technology is on its way.
And in the third place, the "not enough workers to support them because their birth rate is no longer replacing those who die" argument is qualitative, and not sensitive to the difference between 2.099 and 1.86. If you want to make an issue of how far below 2.099 1.86 is, you'll need to present a quantitative argument and run the numbers.
You asserted that 2.1 is the birthrate needed to maintain the population and I have no reason to doubt it. Any birthrate under this will mean that the population decreases. Any birth rate greater than 2.1 and the population will increase. The only thing that lower birth rate of 1.86 and 2.099 will mean is the speed of the decrease in the population.
Yes, working past retirement is a solution for a lower birth rate but it only is a stop gap, measure, as long as the birth rate stays below the replacement rate the problem will keep getting worse, requiring people to work even longer past a common retirement age. Finally it will be work until you die, and even then it will continue to get worse.
Show your work. What you wrote makes no mathematical sense.
Point taken. If everyone works until they die then no one will retire. What I said makes no sense.
But do you want to work until you die to lessen the strain on Social Security?
Increased automation is only going to help in manufacturing and we have pushed most of those jobs overseas. Most people in the US are now in the service industries.
What the heck are you talking about? Labor saving machinery is ubiquitous in service industries and computerization is only accelerating that trend.
The largest service sector is the financial sector and it is heavily computerized. In your opinion are there fewer people working in the financial sector and is the amount of money that they cost the economy more or less than it was forty years ago?
Besides, thanks to the economic policies of neoliberalism all of the gains from automation and improved productivity now go to profits and increased profits don't impact the real economy that we are talking about here. Increased profits makes the rich richer but the rich save their money they don't increase their spending by a great deal if any. This is why supply side economics has been such a failure at spreading the wealth and such a success at making the already rich even richer, which must be the objective of supply side economics.
Macroeconomics takes PhD-level expertise and -- disclaimer -- I'm an Econ-101 guy. But (a) that paragraph sounds ideologically motivated and economically ridiculous, (b) you haven't ever given me a reason to think you have PhD-level expertise on economics, and (c) what you're talking about in that paragraph appears to be orthogonal to the problem of whether high immigration is necessary to keep old people going. If, against all odds, you're right about automation and profits, that only shows we have a distribution problem, not a not-enough-people problem. And we already knew there was a distribution problem. So until you quote a U. of Chicago economist saying Germany needs immigrants because gains from automation go to profits, I have no reason to take that last argument seriously.
I know that you are only an Econ 101 level of understanding of economics. You and I have discussed economics before. I also know that you show no interest in understanding economics any better than you already do.
The University of Chicago is the hot bed of neoliberal economics. They push supply side economics, the idea that if we give all of the gains from automation to the rich that they will invest more, wages will go up and we will all become rich. This doesn't require any great understanding of economics to realize that this doesn't happen. The gains from automation can only split into one of two places, either to wages or to profits. If what we want are higher wages why would we increase profits? If we have been putting all of our gains from productivity gains into profits for the last forty years what conclusions can you draw about supply side economics, is it working?
You have to be careful about economics. Most people do make ideologic statements about economics because they talk about the way that they wished that the economy was. They wish that it was a self-regulating free market. They wish the economy was constrained by supply, that growth was dependent on the amount of capital available. They wish that supply and demand set prices, that marginal productivity forced the price down to the costs of the last possible product produced. That the economy had a natural interest rate and that the economy always seeks general equilibrium. They wish that the market exhibited rational expectations. Some others wish that the economy could be simpler, more local, more like it was in some time in the past, that each contributes based on his abilities and receives based on his needs. Some wish that the government wasn't needed. Some wish that the government could do all of it.
What I try to do is to understand the economy that we have right now. I think that there is a lot of value built in to the economy that we have because it has been tested for two thousand years. It has evolved in response to massive changes. It is very resilient and strong. That we need to deal with the economy the way that it is, not the way that we wish that it could be.
The University of Chicago economics is filled with wishers. The founder of neoliberalism, Milton Friedman of the University of Chicago, had a theory about wishing. He said that the economy could be changed by wishing, that all we have to do is to treat the economy as if it was the way that we wished it to be, and that it will behave for us as if it is the way that we wish it to be. . Sadly, it hasn't worked out. We can't make the government not have to police the economy for bad actors by treating the economy as if there were no bad actors. We can't force the economy full employment, low unemployment equilibrium by wishing that it always returns there.
None of the wishes above are true. The gains from automation, from the increases in productivity do now go into profits. Forty years ago the gains from productivity were split evenly between increases in profits and increases in wages.
1980 is when the wages stopped increasing with growth and increases in productivity. Lower wages equals higher profits.
Social Security is supported by a payroll tax on wages. Automation increases productivity, and decreases wages because it costs jobs, but it increases profits. Automation lowers the payroll taxes collected. No payroll taxes are collected on profits.
Are we clear now?
