Today Mary Anastasia O’Grady’s column in the Wall Street Journal is “Latin America’s Coming Population Bust”. Here’s a snippet:
When the Biden administration opened the southern border, it seemed there was no end to the millions of hungry working-age migrants who wanted to enter the U.S. Western Europe experienced something similar in 2015-16, when German Chancellor Angela Merkel welcomed a flood of refugees, mostly from war-torn Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq.
But the days of an endless supply of labor eager to serve the needs of the developed world may be drawing to a close. Not tomorrow, but soon enough. Countries accustomed to receiving great numbers of aspiring young people from beyond their borders may have to learn to do with fewer.
Here’s the population pyramid for Latin America and the Caribbean:
The short version is that in Latin America and the Caribbean Generation Alpha (the one after Gen Z) is smaller than Millennials and about the same as Generation X. And at this point it is unlikely to get larger (since Gen Beta is hot on its heels).
There are a number of comments that come to mind about that but I’ll limit myself to just one. That’s likely to result in political turbulence and possible upheaval. After decades of convincing people that aggregate consumption is the way to measure economic wellbeing, changing course to convince them that it might not be that important after all will be darned hard.
That chart would suggest strong future wealth creation for Latin America. Japan had a population pyramid very similar to this in 1970 before their economic boom. Similarly, China had a population pyramid similar to this in 1995 before their economic expansion.
The fundamental reason is that the working age population is supporting the young and the elderly. Over the next 20 years, there will be fewer children to support while not needing to support many older people. This allows people to save and invest causing growth in wealth. This wealth boost allows more investment which in turn cranks up economic growth.
As Japan has seen since 1995 (and China will soon be experiencing), growth has stagnated as the elderly population has risen sharply. India and Indonesia also have similar charts today with India about 5 years ahead of Indonesia.
High immigration rates have somewhat obscured the decline in the US, but the native US population is shrinking, especially native whites. Whites are already a minority in the under 15 year-old cohort, and whites will be an absolute minority by 2050, 24 years from now.
This racial demographic change is usually discussed in political ad cultural terms, with France and Germany being cast as our horror show future.
But the total US population will decline, too, especially as the sources of immigrants dry up. The economic effects and dislocations of a reduced US population, with markedly fewer works and a higher dependent to worker ratio, are likely to be severe. Chicago, e.g., already has a political fight over closing public schools that lack students, but not teachers and janitorial staff Not only will total wealth production decline, what is produced will have to undergo a different allocation scheme. Some well-off people will become poor. They will not go down quietly.
We are already well into Turchin’s elite overproduction/worker immiseration crisis. Depopulation will exacerbate it.
In 800 AD, Rome was a rural village of about 40,000 people, down from 1 million people when Rome was the capital of the Empire. The action had long gone east to Constantinople. But there is no Constantinople in the coming future. All the world will just one village after another.