Jim Penman explains how falling birth rates create a temporary economic boost, then a crisis. When retirees hit 40% of the population, the working-age cohort can't sustain pensions and elder care. Public finances collapse and quality of life declines.
There are major problems with declining populations. One of them is your age ratio. See, at the moment you've got something like, I don't know what the figure is, you've got a certain proportion of the population which is too old to work. So you've got your working age population. In fact, one of the things is when the birth rate drops initially, you have a bonus because you get more working age people relative to fewer children and more women in the workforce. So you get this economic boom. Now the trouble is when the birth rate goes down, you get more and more elderly people. Now you get to the stage where say 40% of the population retired. You've got the other— there's a few children there, so maybe 40% of the population is trying to, is trying to support this massive number of, of retired people, support them economically because some of them are going to need pensions. You support them in terms of, of, you know, they need to have their nappies changed in nursing homes. You got all these things needing to take place. It becomes very difficult to look after people when there's too many elderly people and there's too few working age people, and that is not good for quality of life.
Rising mental illness and falling birth rates have the same cause, it is this.....
