The great demographic shift: East Asia’s population decline | Foreign Brief
A demographic shift is underway in East Asia, as deaths have started to overtake births across China, Japan and South Korea. As these societies age and their populations shrink, economic decline will become inevitable.
Am reading Peter Zeihan’s book, The End of the World is Just the Beginning. I see his book as laying plausible scenarios for the future – and agree that the population decline is baked in now for some time to come.
Predicting the future is hard because we are unable to predict human behaviors and innovation. Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb was wrong the day it was published – he seemed oblivious to the crash in the U.S. fertility rate that had already occurred, and he viewed people populations on par with butterfly populations (his specialty). People innovate, butterflies not so much. The result was the calamity he predicted, did not happen.
It’s the same issue facing anyone who works on future predictions – we can come up with plausible scenarios but there will always remain many unknowns.
Population decreases are baked in, at this point – and will lead to significant problems to be dealt with. But we have no idea what great ideas and innovations might yet occur that help us to plow through those difficulties.
