The labor shortage means a decrease in tax revenue for the state, which in turn means less state “services” for those who were promised retirement, healthcare, and so on, in their twilight years.

One might logically think that with a decreasing population, the size of the state would decrease in tandem, as it has less people to account for overall. Government for the people and all that. But the state refuses to decrease. So it will move to replace the waning population with new populations. Therefor immigration and campaigns to increase the birthrate is their only choice, and I suspect this is the way they will hitherto move.

In many of the industrial countries of the world there is talk that there isn't going to be even younger working age people to do enough work to support those that are retired. I wonder what the thoughts are of the members of this forum on this subject. — dclements

Many countries have no social security like the US or Europe. The dynamics of aging and surviving do not rely solely on 'artificially' formed social security. The concepts of resourcefulness and adaptation have been around before social security was implemented.
If you mean that we would revert back the longevity that we've gained as a population because the comfort of social security is threatened, I'd like to hear about the relative costs to longer life and happiness. A five-year gain in longevity does not equate to five-year gain in happiness. The proof? Prior decades, when people lived 5 year less, but happier 5-year more.

While for the last fifty years or so the news has been reporting many issues that threatens to effect our lives there has been one problem that hasn't been really talked about and that there is a problem that world population is not only not growing but it is actually deceasing world wide. In many of the industrial countries of the world there is talk that there isn't going to be even younger working age people to do enough work to support those that are retired. I wonder what the thoughts are of the members of this forum on this subject. — dclements

This is an issue that gets talked about all the time, including here on the forum. The current world population is about 8 billion. That’s expected to reach about 11 billion within 70 years I think. Then it’s supposed to shrink. I don’t think that takes into account the possible consequences of climate change.

It's the fertility rates that are dropping, all over the world and consistently over a long period now. Population will still increase for a while, because of increased life expectancy, but probably will start dropping rather sharply somewhere in the latter half of the century.

The long and short of it, is that it's good for the biosphere and bad for human societies.

Ecologically a lot of the issues are downstream of the sharp increase in population after the industrial revolution because we have taken in a lot of space and our production and consumption has become a strain on the natural world. From that perspective it is good that human population doesn't seem to be increasing indefinitely.

Economically and socially however, a society, or maybe rather our kind of modern societies, will have trouble keeping afloat. Economic growth is assumed and necessary because we rely on it to pay off our debts. For an economy to grow you typically need a constant influx of people of working age. Innovation, another necessity for economic growth, will presumably also decrease as the demographic ages because that generally comes from younger people.

Politically, parties and people tend to view it exclusively from one or the other perspective, even though both are true. It's easier to deny one or the other perspective, because the idea that both are true is rather unsatisfactory as the problem seems hard to solve then... either you get economic and social issues because of decline in population and a skewed demographic pyramid, or you get worse ecological problems because of ever growing economies which will eventually also cause social and economic issues.

I don't think the politics of it matter all that much either way, because policy efforts to increase fertility rates have hitherto been mostly unsuccessful.

I think Japan is going the robot route to handle elderly care. Apparently they’ve been working towards a technological solution for decades. According to the article below, such a solution might only end up creating more work. It will be interesting to see if this option prevails.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/01/09/1065135/japan-automating-eldercare-robots/amp/

I wonder what the thoughts are of the members of this forum on this subject. — dclements

This article touches on some of the concerns: Population decline's effects on global economy.

South Korea is often held up as an example of negative growth that has passed the point of no return (where the present population no longer has the means to reverse negative growth.) The challenge is adapting to a no growth economy, which is foreign territory for a large chunk of the human population. AI and robots to the rescue?