In the movie Deadpool there is a scene where one of the bad guys is being crushed by a slow-moving road compactor. In the scale of human existence, that's what is happening with population collapse in Japan, China, and Italy. At first, you don't notice because most people live in the city, and it is hard to notice changes in population density, it could actually be increasing! However, the countryside is different. A good friend, American Japanese, decided to purchase a house in Japan, it is about 90 minutes from Kyoto, and the cost was 100 Yen (about US$ 10.00) for the house and grounds. The owner had died a few years before and there was no demand for such a house in Japan anymore. A very nice house still. The same story for Italy, where in the countryside you can buy a house for a Euro, but go to the main Italian cities and you will see no changes, the same with the tax base since again the cities are responsible for most of the tax revenues.
Tweaking the birth rate just a little bit had huge long-term implications, shifting the birth rate from 2.1 to 2.3 (child per woman) and the population growth changes dramatically, from memory if you start with a standard population distribution the difference if you start with 1,000 women is that instead of 70 years it takes 30 years to double the population.
But, and this is the problem, 30 and 70 years are things humans have a hard time accepting. A friend just bought "a 20-year-old convertible Mercedes", that's what he said, but when I saw the car it was a 1982 convertible, I said that's not a 20-year-old car, it's a 40-year-old car -- he looked at me and said, you are right I didn't mean a 20-year-old car I meant a car from the 80s...in his head the year 2000 was just yesterday not nearly a quarter of a century ago!
Japan's declining population is not visible because it is happening elsewhere (in the countryside) and it would be hard to notice in the cities. In China, early signs of population pressures started to be visible about five years ago, as wages started rising -- over the last decade manufacturing wages have risen by a factor of 15.
The question of population collapse is therefore very abstract in the short term. China still has a 1.2 million soldier army in place, is building warships and so right now, at this minute, China officially doesn't have a population problem, in fact with the withdrawal of US manufacturing demand in China wages should start dropping. Providing a signal that everything is all right.
However, the eggheads know differently! Using China's own data it would seem that using current mortality tables and the current population breakdown, by 2100 (in 80 years) China's population will have declined from its current 1.3 billion to less than 700 million. However, that assumes that these figures are correct, that women's reproduction rate remains at 1.4 -- but the reality is that this is unlikely as the first place to see a population decline (higher birth rate) is the countryside as people re-locate where easier jobs are into the city. Therefore, we should expect that this 1.4 level will decline to less than 1.0 (rumors are that it's already there), This is where statistics play a nasty trick, for if the birthrate is 1.0 instead of 1.4, then it's not 2100 but 2050, not 80 years but 30 and if it's 0.7 it is 2025 years, and by 2100 the Chinese population would drop to less than 100200 million.
Again, like all projections, this assumes that everything else is equal, this is not real, China could "force" women to have children by making all forms of contraception illegal. We are not there yet, it remains that reversing the trend is difficult if not impossible.
The true nature of a richer world is that birthrates collapse as citizens move away from the countryside where children are short-term assets (labor) to the city where children are an expensive luxury item.
(I changed the numbers because apparently, I underestimated the impact of compounding)
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