Will China’s demographic crisis look like Japan and Korea’s?
from Dean Baker
The New York Times seems to really love telling readers that China is facing a demographic crisis because its population is falling. It is not clear why the NYT thinks this amounts to a crisis for China, since many other countries have declining populations without experiencing any obvious crisis.
The most obvious examples are two of China’s neighbors, Japan and Korea, both of which are seeing modest drops in population. In both countries, per capita income is continuing to rise, in spite of a shrinking workforce. In fact, in South Korea, per capita income has risen at a 2.0 percent annual rate in the last four years, a faster pace than in the United States.
This growth figure actually understates improvements in living standards, since a smaller population also means less congestion and less pollution, factors that are not picked up in GDP. It is not clear why China should be worried if it experiences a similar decline in population.
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Real-World Economics Review Blog 
And the US popn is starting to head down.
A pleasant surprise to read this. So often ‘economists’ release these scare stories, without a thought to the fact that the world was a much better place 70y ago, when there were several milliard fewer people, and, in the UK and US, an average man’s wage, was enough to buy a home, a car, and support a family!
On the contrary, China and Japan are leading the way (all too slowly) towards environmentally sustainable populations. The populations that are in the most serious trouble, are the most crowded, and still growing ones, like the UK, which has long been incapable of feeding itself, yet still relies on the construction industry vaccuuming up the young and fertile of other nations to enforce impossible ‘growth’, just to please the ‘economists’.
It’s high time for the media to kick out the ‘economists’ who are speeding us to extinction on the planet they have been allowed to destroy, and stop vying with our neighbours to boast of ‘growth’, which is just an ever bigger bonfire of resources and pollution booster, and bring in the oeconomists to reverse the paradigm, and introduce an inverse ‘degrowth’ progress towards survivability indicator.
It will be too late to save us all, but it may reduce the suffering for many, if they are lucky.