Topic: A scarier strategic problem - no people

[Inky]

This situation kinda makes me wonder if it would be possible for a country to implement a welfare system based on job availability. Basically, if there are many jobs available, state handouts will be low so as to force people to take these jobs.

[Thucydides]

Actually what will happen is wages will start a non inflationary rise as business starts to feel the pinch of labour shortages. The boom wages in places like Alberta, Saskatchewan, North Dakota and Texas demonstrate what happens when the shortages are regional, the European "Black Death" saw general wage increases throughout Europe since 30% of the population had died off. (this will be the situation in Canada)

In Canada, we will probably see a huge influx of Americans when our demographic "bust" takes hold in the mid 2020's, the location is close and the culture is quite similar so they won't have too much difficulty adapting (and the US still has above replacement level birth rates, so there will be lots of them to do the jobs we no longer can.) By the 2040's, they will be a large and potent force in business and politics, and could well usher in changes that shift Canada into a limited Republican form of government.

[Thucydides]

Mark Steyn on the withering away of the population:

http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/print/286634

Elisabeth’s Barrenness and Ours
Who celebrates a birth nowadays?

Our lesson today comes from the Gospel according to Luke. No, no, not the manger, the shepherds, the wise men, any of that stuff, but the other birth: “But the angel said unto him, Fear not, Zacharias: for thy prayer is heard; and thy wife Elisabeth shall bear thee a son, and thou shalt call his name John.”

That bit of the Christmas story doesn’t get a lot of attention, but it’s in there — Luke 1:13, part of what he’d have called the backstory, if he’d been a Hollywood screenwriter rather than a physician. Of the four gospels, only two bother with the tale of Christ’s birth, and only Luke begins with the tale of two pregnancies. Zacharias is surprised by his impending paternity — “for I am an old man and my wife well stricken in years.” Nonetheless, an aged, barren woman conceives and, in the sixth month of Elisabeth’s pregnancy, the angel visits her cousin Mary and tells her that she, too, will conceive. If you read Luke, the virgin birth seems a logical extension of the earlier miracle — the pregnancy of an elderly lady. The physician-author had no difficulty accepting both. For Matthew, Jesus’s birth is the miracle; Luke leaves you with the impression that all birth — all life — is to a degree miraculous and God-given.

We now live in Elisabeth’s world — not just because technology has caught up with the Deity and enabled women in their 50s and 60s to become mothers, but in a more basic sense. The problem with the advanced West is not that it’s broke but that it’s old and barren. Which explains why it’s broke. Take Greece, which has now become the most convenient shorthand for sovereign insolvency — “America’s heading for the same fate as Greece if we don’t change course,” etc. So Greece has a spending problem, a revenue problem, something along those lines, right? At a superficial level, yes. But the underlying issue is more primal: It has one of the lowest fertility rates on the planet. In Greece, 100 grandparents have 42 grandchildren — i.e., the family tree is upside down. In a social-democratic state where workers in “hazardous” professions (such as, er, hairdressing) retire at 50, there aren’t enough young people around to pay for your three-decade retirement. And there are unlikely ever to be again.

Look at it another way: Banks are a mechanism by which old people with capital lend to young people with energy and ideas. The Western world has now inverted the concept. If 100 geezers run up a bazillion dollars’ worth of debt, is it likely that 42 youngsters will ever be able to pay it off? As Angela Merkel pointed out in 2009, for Germany an Obama-sized stimulus was out of the question simply because its foreign creditors know there are not enough young Germans around ever to repay it. The Continent’s economic “powerhouse” has the highest proportion of childless women in Europe: One in three fräulein have checked out of the motherhood business entirely. “Germany’s working-age population is likely to decrease 30 percent over the next few decades,” says Steffen Kröhnert of the Berlin Institute for Population Development. “Rural areas will see a massive population decline and some villages will simply disappear.”

If the problem with socialism is, as Mrs. Thatcher says, that eventually you run out of other people’s money, much of the West has advanced to the next stage: It’s run out of other people, period. Greece is a land of ever fewer customers and fewer workers but ever more retirees and more government. How do you grow your economy in an ever-shrinking market? The developed world, like Elisabeth, is barren. Collectively barren, I hasten to add. Individually, it’s made up of millions of fertile women, who voluntarily opt for no children at all or one designer kid at 39. In Italy, the home of the Church, the birthrate’s somewhere around 1.2, 1.3 children per couple — or about half “replacement rate.” Japan, Germany, and Russia are already in net population decline. Fifty percent of Japanese women born in the Seventies are childless. Between 1990 and 2000, the percentage of Spanish women childless at the age of 30 almost doubled, from just over 30 percent to just shy of 60 percent. In Sweden, Finland, Austria, Switzerland, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, 20 percent of 40-year-old women are childless. In a recent poll, invited to state the “ideal” number of children, 16.6 percent of Germans answered “None.” We are living in Zacharias and Elisabeth’s world — by choice.

America is not in as perilous a situation as Europe — yet. But its rendezvous with fiscal apocalypse also has demographic roots: The Baby Boomers did not have enough children to maintain the solvency of mid-20th-century welfare systems premised on mid-20th-century birthrates. The “Me Decade” turned into a Me Quarter-Century, and beyond. The “me”s are all getting a bit long in the tooth, but they never figured there might come a time when they’d need a few more “them”s still paying into the treasury.

The notion of life as a self-growth experience is more radical than it sounds. For most of human history, functioning societies have honored the long run: It’s why millions of people have children, build houses, plant trees, start businesses, make wills, put up beautiful churches in ordinary villages, fight and if necessary die for your country . . . A nation, a society, a community is a compact between past, present, and future, in which the citizens, in Tom Wolfe’s words at the dawn of the “Me Decade,” “conceive of themselves, however unconsciously, as part of a great biological stream.”

Much of the developed world climbed out of the stream. You don’t need to make material sacrifices: The state takes care of all that. You don’t need to have children. And you certainly don’t need to die for king and country. But a society that has nothing to die for has nothing to live for: It’s no longer a stream, but a stagnant pool.

If you believe in God, the utilitarian argument for religion will seem insufficient and reductive: “These are useful narratives we tell ourselves,” as I once heard a wimpy Congregational pastor explain her position on the Bible. But, if Christianity is merely a “useful” story, it’s a perfectly constructed one, beginning with the decision to establish Christ’s divinity in the miracle of His birth. The hyper-rationalists ought at least to be able to understand that post-Christian “rationalism” has delivered much of Christendom to an utterly irrational business model: a pyramid scheme built on an upside-down pyramid. Luke, a man of faith and a man of science, could have seen where that leads. Like the song says, Merry Christmas, baby.

— Mark Steyn, a National Review columnist, is the author of After America: Get Ready for Armageddon. ©2011 Mark Steyn

[Thucydides]

long term demographic changes will make the future very different from what was expected. Structural changes will overturn lots of current policies and probably many political parties and movements will discover that the underlying demographic changes are beyond their ability to influence. The other result of demographic change is that open societies will have a disticnt advantage over closed societies:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/04/europe-8217-s-real-crisis/8915/

Europe’s Real Crisis
The Continent’s problems are as much demographic as financial. They won’t go away soon.

By MEGAN MCARDLE

Annie Griffiths Belt/Corbis

ALL OF US can breathe easy now: policy makers and analysts finally agree on how to fix Europe’s problems.

“Europe Debt Crisis Plan Hinges on Economic Growth,” declared the Los Angeles Times in October, after finance ministers announced what felt like the hundredth plan to seriously, no-foolin’-this-time, really rescue the European Union’s illiquid and insolvent states.

“Countries have to undergo significant structural reforms that would revamp growth,” said Mario Draghi, the head of the European Central Bank, in a December interview with the Financial Times.

“Austerity is not enough, even for budgetary discipline, if economic activity does not pick up a decent rate of growth,” Italian Prime Minister Mario Monti told The Economist in January.

Their words have been echoed in a thousand or more op-eds, policy briefs, and TV spots, for good reason. Growth could fix so many dire fiscal and political problems—not just in Europe, but all over the developed world.

If only economic growth could be delivered on demand, like a pizza, just minutes after we realize we want it. Unfortunately, growth (or at least the sustainable variety) is typically a long time in the baking, and dependent on two main ingredients: more workers and higher worker productivity. And much of Europe is short on the former. That has big implications for Europe’s future.

Consider Italy. It is no exaggeration to say that the fate of Italy is the fate of the euro zone: if Italy can keep its debt under control and its banking system solvent, the euro zone will probably make it; if Italy defaults, the resulting panic will probably force Portugal, Ireland, Greece, and Spain to follow suit.

This linchpin is under a great deal of strain. Italy’s public debt stands at $2.3 trillion, roughly 20 percent larger than the country’s GDP. If not for that debt, Italy would have run a slight budget surplus in 2011. But interest payments alone soaked up nearly 5 percent of the GDP, creating a deficit of about 3.6 percent of national income and increasing the debt even more.

This has left Italy incredibly vulnerable. For every percentage point that the interest rate on the debt increases, Italians have to divert another 1.2 percent of national income into debt payments. And because markets are worried about this problem, interest rates have been rising at a brisk clip, with only occasional pauses while the powers that be deploy yet another emergency rescue plan.

Sweating this debt down by austerity alone would take ages, cause immense suffering among people who depended on the cut services, and—as Greece has shown—draw fierce public opposition. Moreover, commentators like Paul Krugman argue that it would actually make the problem worse in the short term, because government austerity makes the economy contract. As they see it, trying to close Europe’s fiscal gaps with austerity alone is like trying to get out of a deep hole by digging harder.

Strong growth by Europe’s troubled debtor nations would of course offer a different, and less painful, way out. After all, if you make $30,000 a year, a $10,000 credit-card balance is crippling; but if you make $300,000 a year, it’s fairly trivial. The faster Italy’s economy expands, the more manageable Italy’s debt becomes.

But that’s where the dearth of workers comes into play. Everyone agrees that rapid growth would be much nicer than higher taxes and slashed pension payments. The hitch is that over the past five years, growth in the Italian economy hasn’t averaged even 1 percent a year. Soaring growth will be tough to achieve, because more and more Italians are getting too old to work—and fewer and fewer Italians have been having the babies needed to replace them.

Italy’s fertility rate has actually been inching up from its 1995 low of 1.19 children for every woman, but it is still only about 1.4—well below the number needed to replenish its population (2.1). As a result, even with some immigration, Italy’s population growth has been very slow. It will soon stall, and eventually go into reverse. And then, one by one, the rest of Europe’s nations will follow. Not one country on the Continent has a fertility rate high enough to replace its current population. Heavy debt and a shrinking population are a very bad combination.

SINCE THE INVENTION of birth control and antibiotics, country after country has gone through a fairly standard shift. First, the mortality rate drops, especially among the young and the aging, and that quickly translates into a bigger workforce. Then, birthrates drop, as families realize that they no longer need to birth a basketball team to ensure that a couple members will survive to adulthood. A falling birthrate means that parents can invest more in each child; with fewer mouths to feed, more and better food can nourish each of them, and children can spend more years in school, causing worker productivity to rise from one generation to the next. As the burden of bearing and rearing children lightens, mothers can do more work outside the home, boosting both household resources and the national economy.

In 1984, when Ronald Reagan spoke of “morning in America,” he was at least demographically accurate. The youngest members of America’s vast Baby Boom were in college; the oldest were on the brink of their peak earning power. America was about to reap what the economists David Bloom and David Canning have dubbed the “demographic dividend” of rising labor supply and productivity. Bloom and Canning’s analysis of East Asia and Ireland attributes a substantial fraction of the recent economic booms in those places to this dividend.

But the dividend does not last forever. Eventually, the baby bulge reaches retirement age, the labor force stops growing, and older workers start spending their savings, depleting the nation’s supply of capital. The virtuous cycle turns vicious. This is what is happening right now in much of southern Europe.

IS STRONG GROWTH still possible once the demographic dividend has been paid out? Of course it is, at least in theory. Even if the workforce isn’t expanding, strong-enough gains in worker productivity can substantially lift the economy. Longer hours and longer careers can theoretically have the same effect. But it is far from clear that in practice, these solutions will work, given the advanced age of Europe’s workers.

To see why, picture two neighboring towns, sharing all the same infrastructure and economic opportunities, with one key difference: their median age. In the first town, which I’ll call Morningburg, the average resident is 28. In the second, which I’ll call Twilight City, the average householder is 58.

Research indicates that even with all the same resources at their disposal, these two places look very different, and not just because one’s grocery store does a booming business in diapers while the other’s has a whole aisle devoted to Centrum Silver.

In Morningburg, young workers are rapid, plastic learners, eager to try out new ways of doing things. Since they’re still hoping to make a name for themselves and maybe get rich, they take a lot of risks. They push their managers to expand into new markets, propose iffy but innovative product lines, maybe start their own firm if the boss won’t let them advance fast enough. For the right opportunity, they’ll put in 18-hour days for a year or more.

In Twilight City, time horizons are shorter—people aren’t looking for projects that will make them rich or famous 20 years from now. They are interested in conserving what they have. That’s mostly rational, given Twilighters’ life stage; but studies show that older people worry more than younger ones about losses and are therefore especially averse to risk. Twilighters also tire more easily and need more time off for illness, so hours worked slowly decline each year. Wages stay steady, however; Twilighters, like most people, get very angry if you try to cut their salary.

That makes Twilighters expensive—so when they lose a job, finding another is tough. As a result, Twilighters tend to cling fiercely to their positions, and may block younger workers from getting a foothold in the labor market.

The difficulty of reemployment contributes to Twilight City’s surprisingly high, but somewhat deceptive, rate of entrepreneurship. Looking closely, we find that businesses there are disproportionately owned by semi-retirees who have hung out a consulting shingle, or become part-time caterers, or invested in a hobby business like an antique store. These businesses typically don’t have much growth potential, in part because cautious Twilighters won’t (or can’t) borrow money for expansion.

Morningburg is a boomtown, prone to periodic savage busts when the young strivers realize that those fur-bearing-trout farms they invested in aren’t going to make them rich. Twilight City is a less volatile place—but little change also means little growth.

In theory, smart policy could make Twilight City look a little more like Morningburg: public investment and forced savings could boost research and business development; employment laws could be reformed to make labor markets more flexible; heavy investments could be made in education to improve the productivity of Twilight City’s few young workers.

In practice, all of this is likely to be fiercely opposed by Twilight City’s citizens, who tend to vote against change, particularly if it threatens their pensions or health care. Many of the most vehement public demonstrations in Europe over the past two decades have followed attempts at pension reform.

IT IS SOMEWHAT ironic that the first serious strains caused by Europe’s changing demographics are showing up in the Continent’s welfare budgets, because the pension systems themselves may well have shaped, and limited, Europe’s growth. The 20th century saw international adoption of social-security systems that promised defined benefits paid out of future tax revenue—known to pension experts as “paygo” systems, and to critics as Ponzi schemes. These systems have greatly eased fears of a destitute old age, but multiple studies show that as social-security systems become more generous (and old age more secure), people have fewer children. By one estimate, 50 to 60 percent of the difference between America’s (above-replacement) birthrate and Europe’s can be explained by the latter’s more generous systems. In other words, Europe’s pension system may have set in motion the very demographic decline that helped make that system—and some European governments—insolvent.

Pension and other welfare benefits, promised long ago when the workforce was expanding quickly, are at the heart of Europe’s current fiscal convulsions, which are perhaps a harbinger of worse to come. In David Canning’s view, the 2008 crash and its aftermath have merely moved up a long-inevitable implosion by 10 to 15 years. European nations “had unrealistic systems that were eventually going to cause a crisis,” he told me.

These difficulties are why almost everyone who studies the interaction of rich-world demographics and economic growth recommends raising the retirement age and forcing people to save more on their own, well before a debt crisis hits. “Aging is a good thing,” Canning says. “It means health improvements and longer lives. We only think it’s a bad thing because we’re trying to hang on to these institutions. We should be welcoming these changes, but changing our institutions to match.” He and Bloom, among others, are urging countries to use their demographic dividends wisely—to reinvest them in the things that make their workforces more productive. If they do that, perhaps living standards can keep rising.

“There’s a big difference between aggregate GDP growth and per capita GDP growth,” says Nick Eberstadt of the American Enterprise Institute. “For personal well-being, what matters is per capita GDP growth. You can certainly imagine a country with declining GDP but increasing per capita well-being.”

You certainly can imagine it, but it seems hard to actually achieve in a country with heavy national debt. If the population is shrinking but the debt burden isn’t, then promises to bondholders will weigh ever more heavily on each person. The government could default, of course, but the resulting crisis would also depress growth.

For the most part, Europe has already spent its demographic dividend. And the recent inability of countries like Spain and Greece to hit their deficit targets illustrates just how difficult coping with financial and fiscal instability can be when growth fails to materialize as expected. Neither voters nor employers were prepared to make the necessary compromises—and as the endless, fractious negotiations over Greek debt show, it is very hard to get them to adjust to reality, even when the alternative is disastrous. We shouldn’t necessarily expect people to become more resigned to compromise as time goes on—quite possibly we should expect the opposite.

Southern Europe is already living in Twilight City. And those of us who live in Morningburg or Afternoonville should pay close attention to what happens next, because eventually, we’re all heading to that neck of the woods. The United Nations estimates that by 2030, the number of people older than 60 will be growing more than three times as fast as the general population. By 2050, one in every five people will be over 60. In the developed world, the proportion will be more like one in three. Europe (along with Japan) is at the forefront of an unprecedented shift.

“The problem,” says Canning, “is that aging is a new thing. We know quite well what the effects of going to low fertility are—but we’ve never seen this sort of aging before, so it’s hard to make predictions.”

One prediction is safe, however: aging will present challenges that, as of now, no nation has adequately prepared to face.

http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2012/03/14/does-the-anglosphere-still-rule/

Does The Anglosphere Still Rule?

I’ve been attending a State Department lunch for British prime minister David Cameron today and found myself thinking about some recent points Joel Kotkin and Shashi Parulekar have made about the prospects for the English speaking world.

China’s rapid growth over the last decade, coupled with the world financial crisis that has left Western states struggling to overcome political gridlock over mounting debt, has led many to forecast the end of Western global hegemony. Predictably, as the creators of the modern liberal world order, the Anglosphere states are the prime target of the declinists’ ire. Via Meadia has been closely following this issue for some time and believes that declinists’ claims are grossly overstated. Luckily we are not alone. In a recently published article in City Journal, Joel Kotkin and Shashi Parulekar take the naysayers to task over their predictions of doom and gloom for the Anglos.

Kotkin and Parulekar begin their case with economics. The authors set out to debunk the myth of the rapid success that pseudo-capitalist emerging economies like China have had recently by pointing out that the Anglosphere still “accounts for more than one-quarter of the world’s GDP—more than $18 trillion” and that “the vast majority of the world’s leading software, biotechnology, and aerospace firms are concentrated in English-speaking countries.” Where is the Apple of China, the Google of Russia, the Facebook of Brazil?

In addition to noting the economic and cultural advantages the Anglosphere still enjoys, perhaps the most interesting part of their article is their discussion on demographics. Much has been said about the huge population of China and how they will dwarf anything the Anglos can produce. But often overlooked is how rapidly China will age. “China now has a fertility rate of 1.6, even lower than that of Western Europe.” The graying of society will be a huge economic issue in the 21st century, and how countries deal with that will decide their success or failure. Bolstered by immigration, Anglo countries like the United States and Australia will be able to avoid the age-related issues that closed societies like China and Japan face.

[Thucydides]

The progressive model drives Italy to extinction?

http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2012/03/20/italian-war-on-young-becomes-fight-for-survival/#comment-69221

Italy Winning Its War on the Young — And Losing Its Hope For the Future

Italy is not a good place to be young and, not surprisingly, there aren’t that many young Italians coming along. ISTAT reported in January that youth unemployment now stands at an astonishing 30.1 percent, a record high for the country. Rather than striking out on their own, young Italians are increasingly living with their parents well into their thirties and forties, and many now are contemplating a lifetime without long-term employment. The opening to this Times piece is particularly evocative:

    Assunta Linza, a bright-eyed 33-year-old with a college degree in psychology, has been unemployed since June, after losing a temporary job as a call-center operator. Her father, who is 60 and has a fifth-grade education, took early retirement with full benefits at age 42 from a job as a workman at the Italian state railway company.

    “Everyone said that kids should study to get ahead, but I graduated with highest honors, and the only thing my degree is good for is to hang on the wall,” Ms. Linza said dryly.

As the Times points out, Italy is racked by perverse labor laws that pamper the old while condemning the young to a lifetime of poverty and insecurity. Italian laws mandating that workers not be fired without just cause, combined with a legal system that heavily favors workers, have created a system in which companies are wary of making new hires. Even the labor reforms proposed by the new technocratic government may not be enough to remedy the situation, and in any case unions are fighting tooth and nail to remove any bite these reforms may have. They will probably succeed at least partially. Italy is almost certain to reform much more slowly and irregularly than it should.

The stakes in Italy are higher than many Italians seem to grasp.  This isn’t just about Italy’s prosperity or its ability to stay in the euro. It is about survival. Italy’s birthrate is far below the natural rate of replacement; that is not unrelated to an economic system that makes it impossible for large numbers of young people to start households of their own.

Unless Italy becomes a country where twenty somethings can routinely leave home and build promising careers so that they have both the economic means to marry and the security to embrace the responsibilities of parenthood, Italians will become a demographic curiosity in their own country — and sooner rather than later.

In the 17th century, when Pope Urban VIII (one of the Barberini popes) melted ancient bronze pieces from the Pantheon to build the baldacchino in St. Peters, one satirist said, “What the barbarians did not do the Barberini did.” Today we must say that labor laws and sclerotic economic management are doing what plagues, barbarians and wars failed to accomplish: putting the future of the Italian people at risk.

[Thucydides]

After spending their, their children and grand children's inheritance, the German Boomers make a final slap in the face of the young. Expect lots of new German speaking neighbours in the years ahead as young Germans flee the opressive tax regime:

http://www.smh.com.au/world/germany-set-to-tax-young-20120405-1wfh3.html

Germany set to tax young
April 6, 2012

"The German Chancellor's ruling party is seeking extra sources of revenue to pay for soaring pensions and bills for social care costs as Germany's 'baby boomer' generation ages amid a decline in the birth rate."

GERMANY is proposing to levy extra taxes on the young to pay for the costs of the country's growing numbers of old people, under government plans for a ''demographic reserve'' levy.

Angela Merkel's Christian Democrats have drafted proposals that, if law, would require all those over 25 to pay a proportion of their income to cushion Germany against a looming population crisis.

The German Chancellor's ruling party is seeking extra sources of revenue to pay for soaring pensions and bills for social care costs as Germany's ''baby boomer'' generation ages amid a decline in the birth rate.

The proposals, to be adopted by Dr Merkel's party cabinet after the Easter break, have not yet set a figure on the age tax but officials are considering a special levy of about 1 per cent of income.

Because of a slump in Germany's population, as more ageing Germans retire there are fewer young workers to replace them as taxpayers to fund generous welfare and pension arrangements.

Estimates from Germany's federal employment agency predict that the workforce will be reduced by 7 million people by 2025.

''We have to consider the time after 2030 when the baby boomers of the '50s and '60s are retired and costing us more in health and care costs,'' said Gunter Krings, who drafted the Christian Democrat position paper.

Telegraph, London

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/world/germany-set-to-tax-young-20120405-1wfh3.html#ixzz1rPr6iFc3

[GAP]

If this takes off, most of the Eurozone will do it.....talk about shooting yourself in the foot...

[Thucydides]

Happily for us, a wave of European immigration over the next 10-15 years will do nicely to paper over our own demographic bust and provide the pool of skilled workers needed across this nation. They will probably be joined by a wave of Americans with similar ideas. I'm all for this since this will solve a lot of problems for us, and cultural integration will be less of an issue with European and American immigrants.

[Kirkhill]

But Thuc:

From the States you are likely to get Democrats and all the Europeans have been raised by Social Democrat teachers.

Careful what you wish for. 

[Thucydides]

Those people may want to come in abstract, but the wave of American media personalities who threatened to come to Canada if George W Bush was re elected never arrived.

Since our immigration system will be screening for workers with marketable skills, I suspect the filter will be pretty good at screening out Dems and Social Democrats. As a twofer, it means more and more people back in the old country voting benefits for themselves and providing higher and higher incentives for the remainder to leave. As a historical aside, when Belgium nationalized their healthcare system decades ago, doctors began packing their bags and leaving. To fight the trend, the Belgian government of the day drafted all the remaining doctors and held them in country as part of their military service requirements.

Expect measures like that, seizure of chattel property, exit taxes and other means to counter the exodus of working age people from Europe

[Thucydides]

Until the incentives to have children improve, I suspect technological "fixes" like this will be more theoretical than real. Still, it is nice to think that we could turn out generations of new Canadians in sufficient numbers to stop the demographic bust if we decided to do so:

http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2012-04/lab-grown-human-eggs-made-stem-cells-could-make-women-fertile-forever

Human Eggs Grown in the Lab Could Produce Unlimited Supply of Humans
By Rebecca BoylePosted 04.12.2012 at 3:00 pm15 Comments

The first human eggs grown from human stem cells could be fertilized with human sperm cells later this year, potentially revolutionizing fertility treatment for women. This could be one more step on the path toward reproduction sans human interaction — in this case, a potential parent wouldn’t even need to donate her eggs. But it could also turn stem cells into an infinite loop, of egg cells into embryos into stem cells, and on and on, in a fractal-like repetition of reproduction.

In February, we heard about a study involving Japanese women whose reproductive stem cells were donated because they were undergoing gender reassignment surgery. Researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital were able to coax these ovarian stem cells into becoming immature human egg cells, which were then incubated in mice so they’d have the proper ovarian structures. Now these same scientists, working with a team at Edinburgh University, want to fertilize them.

After sperm implantation, the scientists would watch the blastocysts develop into embryos for two weeks — the legal limit — and determine if they’re viable. Then these embryos would either be frozen or "allowed to perish," according to the Independent. The tests would validate the stem-cell-derived human eggs, more properly called oocytes, and serve as an early indicator of whether they could someday be used to eradicate infertility.

Stem-cell derived oocytes could replenish the stocks of women undergoing menopause, or they could be used to allow infertile women to reproduce. The Independent goes so far as to mention an “elixir of youth,” wherein women of any age are full of stem-cell derived oocytes, remaining fertile and youthfully healthy forever.

This potential stem cell-based embryo construction still faces some hurdles — reproductive biologists are applying for a license to the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority in the UK. But if it’s approved, the eggs could be fertilized this year, according to the Independent.
Stem cells hold such great promise because they can differentiate into any cell, potentially replacing neurons, islet cells, kidney cells and more. But this research conceivably turns stem cells into an infinite supply of cellular material. The stem cell eggs would obviously most likely be used to help women conceive a child, but it’s not a huge leap to much more frightening scenarios: Stem cells turned into human egg cells, which could be fertilized to grow embryos, which would contain more stem cells, which could in turn be harvested .... and so on, as self-contained stem cell factories. It will be interesting to see how the UK authority interprets the possibilities.

[Thucydides]

Japan's future is very similar to where we are going demographically, the only variable is we allow virtually unrestricted immigration whereas the Japanese allow virtually no one in. Even without people we have the ability to bank on resource wealth, something Japan does not have. The political and economic consequences of Japan essentially disappearing from the world stage are scary to contemplate.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/29/opinion/sunday/douthat-incredible-shrinking-country.html?partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

Incredible Shrinking Country
By ROSS DOUTHAT
Published: April 28, 2012
   
“THE Children of Men,” P. D. James’s 1992 novel, is set in a future where the world’s male population has become infertile, and an aging Britain is adapting to the human race’s gradual extinction. Women push dolls in baby carriages. Families baptize kittens. There are state-run “national porn shops” to stimulate the flagging male libido. Suicide flourishes. Immigrants are welcomed as guest laborers but expelled once they become too old to work. The last children born on earth — the so-called “Omegas” — have grown up to be bored, arrogant, antisocial and destructive.
Josh Haner/The New York Times

James’s book, like most effective dystopias, worked by exaggerating existing trends — the plunge in birthrates across the developed world, the spread of voluntary euthanasia in nations like the Netherlands and Switzerland, the European struggle to assimilate a growing immigrant population.

But one developed nation is making “Children of Men” look particularly prophetic. In Japan, birthrates are now so low and life expectancy so great that the nation will soon have a demographic profile that matches that of the American retirement community of Palm Springs. “Gradually but relentlessly,” the demographer Nick Eberstadt writes in the latest issue of The Wilson Quarterly, “Japan is evolving into a type of society whose contours and workings have only been contemplated in science fiction.”

Eberstadt has spent years writing about the challenges posed by declining fertility around the globe. But Japan, he notes, is a unique case. The Japanese birthrate hovers around just 1.3 children per woman, far below the level required to maintain a stable population. Thanks to increasing life expectancy, by 2040 “there could almost be one centenarian on hand to welcome each Japanese newborn.” Over the same period, the overall Japanese population is likely to decline by 20 percent, with grim consequences for an already-stagnant economy and an already-strained safety net.

Japan is facing such swift demographic collapse, Eberstadt’s essay suggests, because its culture combines liberalism and traditionalism in particularly disastrous ways. On the one hand, the old sexual culture, oriented around arranged marriage and family obligation, has largely collapsed. Japan is one of the world’s least religious nations, the marriage rate has plunged and the divorce rate is higher than in Northern Europe.

Yet the traditional stigma around out-of-wedlock childbearing endures, which means that unmarried Japanese are more likely to embrace “voluntary childlessness” than the unwed parenting that’s becoming an American norm. And the traditional Japanese suspicion of immigration (another possible source for demographic vitality) has endured into the 21st century as well. Eberstadt notes that “in 2009 Japan naturalized barely a third as many new citizens as Switzerland, a country with a population only 6 percent the size of Japan’s and a reputation of its own for standoffishness.”

These trends are forging a society that sometimes evokes the infertile Britain in James’s dystopia. Japan has one of the highest suicide rates in the developed world, and there were rashes of Internet-enabled group suicides in the last decade. Rental “relatives” are available for sparsely attended wedding parties; so-called “babyloids” — furry dolls that mimic infant sounds — are being developed for lonely seniors; and Japanese researchers are at the forefront of efforts to build robots that resemble human babies. The younger generation includes millions of so-called “parasite singles” who still live with (and off) their parents, and perhaps hundreds of thousands of the “hikikomori” — “young adults,” Eberstadt writes, “who shut themselves off almost entirely by retreating into a friendless life of video games, the Internet and manga (comics) in their parents’ home.”

If there’s any reason for real optimism in this picture, it’s for Americans, rather than for Japanese. Twenty years ago, when declinists predicted that the United States would soon cede global leadership to Japan, they cited the same domestic trends that pessimists (this columnist included) often cite today: our unsustainable deficits and our fraying social fabric, our decadent culture and our uncompetitive economy.

These problems are still with us, and some of them are worse than ever. But they haven’t left us in anything like the plight the Japanese are facing. Our family structures are weakening, but high out-of-wedlock birthrates may be preferable to no births at all. We assimilate immigrants more slowly than we should, but at least we’re capable of assimilation. American religion can be shallow, narcissistic and divisive, but our religious institutions still supply solidarity and uplift as well. Our economy is weak and our deficits are large, but at least we aren’t asking the next generation to bear the kinds of burdens that today’s under-30 Japanese will someday have to shoulder.

There is one modern world, but every civilization takes a different route through it. For all our problems, 21st-century Americans should be thankful that we aren’t headed toward the same sunset as Japan.