Right and like the US is still in a place where they haven’t actually had any groups exit the reproductive window with fewer than 2 kids. TFR can have some noise from timing compared to Completed which is noisy. X axis is year of birth. Y axis kids at the end of fertile window.
I think the graph of completed fertility makes it much clearer this isn’t a consistent global phenomenon. In the US women in the 1970s had materially more kids than women born in the 1950s. TFR has noise from birth timing moving later.
If you look at the graph above, US, Norway, and Netherlands were all materially higher in the 2000s than the 80s. That’s just not a consistent decline. And if you look at completed fertility which is lagging but cleaner, even more clear there is no consistent cross country trend.
Right but 1.9 or something is completely fine. 1.0 is going to crush your entire civilisation look at these forecasts for Korea. Less than half the population of working age, nearly half of retirement age. That’s a disaster.
Yeah this doesn’t really make sense to look at. You have a bunch of high growth countries going through the big fertility transition getting smoothed out here. Then a bunch of developed countries that were flattish for 40-50 countries until 2008 plus a bunch of Asian countries going to 0.
Secondly plenty of Asian cultures are in the population shrinkage regime already. China forecast to lose 600m people over the next 60 years. Korea will lose half by 2060 iirc. It’s losing 0.2m/year and that’s predicted to accelerate.
Eh, quite a lot wrong with this. Firstly the challenge is shrinking working age population rather than shrinking population and that is already arrived in Japan Germany and Italy.
Yeah I mean I think Asia does actually have a cultural problem here. They have birth rates that are truly abysmal. Think in Europe and US there is much more reason to think it’s mostly material factors that could be unwound.
For 25 years into the GFC Norway was rising and was nearly back to replacement. Think you can quite easily tell stories in US and Europe where this is mostly just material circumstances- the current crop of 30-40 year olds really have had it hard on this stuff!
US was in good shape as recently as 2008 when the GFC scarred the Labour force prospects of a generation at the same time houses started getting majorly undersupplied in the US.
I mean I get mad when people post these charts as if it’s one big global trend. You might note on that chart for example that Portugal has been rising continuously since it bottomed in 2012/13. It’s one of the few high performing EU economies.
This is such a killer graph - every uk local area is a blue dot vs some sample American cities. San Francisco isn’t even unusual for uk areas! And the uk has no where within a million miles of mid tier like Atlanta nm Las Vegas.
It’s partly that and partly they don’t adjust for how much smaller uk homes are. The average dwelling size in the whole of the uk is smaller than the average dwelling size in NYC. So the price per square foot is vastly higher relative to income.
Yes I always have this issue with Americans. They truly cannot conceive of how squeezed Uk housing is. The Uk as a whole has a worse supply/demand imbalance than NYC which is considered among the worst housing markets in the US.
If this graph doesn’t seem self evidently ridiculous to you I don’t know what to say. Obviously under normal English language wales has more empty homes than London.
