UKH

I'm trying to understand how the declining UK birth rate will affect our future demographics. If the birth rate stabilises would our older demographic problem be a short lived thing? Like in 40 years or so it'll be less of an issue? Or is the fact that we're no where near the rate to replenish our population going to mean these problems persist indefinitely?

Perhaps its a side effect of austerity? Prior to that the birth rate had increased significantly since 1997, hence we will see a further significant increase in secondary school numbers over the next few years

Another way of looking at it is that although there have been fluctuations it's not changed that much since the early '70's 

Not sure, immigration (or lack of it) will also have a major effect and I don't think we will see another baby boom. 

People living longer, but not necessarily being healthy and the resultant impact it will have on health and social care costs is IMO more of a problem. 

The Office for National Statistics (ONS) current projection is the deaths will exceed births by 2025. However net immigration will mean our population will continue to rise. That's principally working age economic migrants. 

Scroll down to the chart, which shows total population continuing to increase well into the 2040s

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/...

In terms of age-structure, if the current low birth rates continue in the same pattern as the last 15 or so years, we are going to have a smaller economically active population in future. This will greatly alter the ratio of workers (18-65s) to dependents (0-17 & 65+).

I've heard on youtube that the worldwide birth rate has plummeted since the pandemic began. I can't find much official sources, do you know much about that? 

So more of a gradual decline in the native population. I thought it was declining rapidly.

That's what I meant.

Cheers

So will that continue or once the generation born at a higher birth rate are gone will the situation improve? My maths isn't up to task. 

Cheers

So will that continue or once the generation born at a higher birth rate are gone will the situation improve? My maths isn't up to task. 

Not sure about world wide, but dispite the nudge,nudge,wink,wink headlines in the tabloids at the time the birth rate dropped significantly during lockdown.

https://www.gavi.org/vaccineswork/effect-lockdowns-birth-rates-uk 

I think the pessimistic economic outlook will mean that won't recover quickly. 

In terms of the number of kids being born in the UK, it's declining rapidly, but only for the last 10 or so years, back to thr same level at the end of the 1990's which in turn had seen a similar  decline since the late 1980's. There are more kids being born in the UK at the moment than in the late 1970's 

https://www.statista.com/statistics/281981/live-births-in-the-united-kingdo...

Sorry for misunderstanding. I think part of the solution is to keep people healthy, so they can work, at least part-time, for longer. Far fewer jobs are now as physically demanding and detrimental to health as they once were. The miners pension fund now has a massive surplus, but a major reason for this isn't a positive one. 

In my mind these low birth rates were a modern thing, didn't realise this had been going on since the 70's. You've set me right, no further questions your honour! 

I've had the chop, so can't really contribute to this thread 

Did you teabag Mrs num num?

I've already had five kids, my work here is done.

Apparently the UK 2019 birth rate is 1.65 children per woman (how they calculate this I have no idea, sounds complicated).

Add to that people are living longer then we are going to end up with a ever decreasing working population paying for a disproportionately larger aging population with ever increasing health care requirements.

One other variable is retirement age, struggling to find up to date information but it appears to have been declining between 2008 and 2013 which will only add to the problem.

So one solution is to encourage immigration of younger people who are likely to stay and have families here.

Unfortunately this is a worldwide issue (except for sub-Saharan Africa) so I expect problems to continue indefinitely.

Good work. I've had two but neither me nor my wife have the capacity for another. 

best way to visualise it is to imagine how the age pyramid evolves.

The ons has a nice tool to do that : 

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/...

Population demographic here are quite interesting.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/281981/live-births-in-the-united-kingdo...

The 19th century was much higher than it is now for births but poor health would have limited the numbers reaching adulthood. The drop off after 1964 seems to coincide with increasingly reliable contraception (the pill first became legal here in 1961)

People are also living longer as you say but i feel that is dependant largely upon access to medical help. If that changes then I would expect to see a drop in the age level. Improved health and safety in the work place is also a factor as is the clean air bill.

I also feel that the increase in longer term disabiling illness (dementia, arthritis, stroke, heart disease, cancer etc.) is in large part due to people not dying sooner of other causes.

In the future, as you say, I expect immigration will be necessary to meet our needs.

I was wondering the other day what life will be like for the (aging) millenials once the boomers are out of the picture

^^ This. It's all about the 'dependency ratio' - workers paying taxes vs. non-workers consuming government spend.  As the healthcare and pensions of the workers of the past are paid for by the workers of today instead of them being paid for by the tax and national insurance contributions of the workers of the past it's deemed necessary to keep the number of workers high to pay for the glut of pensioners caused by the post-ww2 baby boom and improvements in H&S and healthcare.

I guess it's the 'early retirement' taken by many of my older ex-colleagues who benefitted from final salary pensions and massive house price inflation doing this.

...which unfortunately prolongs the return to a sensible level of population due to the kids. What's really wanted is young workers who aren't going to have kids who will move back home to retire.

Yep. It's going to be a major issue for the west for my lifetime.

Robots will provide a large part of the "unskilled" tasks solution in countries that can afford them. How long it takes before this is significant - get your crystal ball out 😁

I strongly suspect you can trace a chunk of the decline to Brexit; EU nationals working in the UK were predominantly of breeding age, and anecdotally, I think many did, especially those taking advantage of our still relatively good health and education services. If those people have left post-Brexit, it will hit the birth rate.

Yes, I would agree that would have had an effect, how big I'm not sure. I might be overly traditional in my outlook, but I can see the recent "fiscal event" also having a significant effect. How many couples had just managed to buy their first house and were planning to start a family, but now are delaying it due to concerns about their mortgage?

Edit. The current decline started in 2008 (and was similar to the decline in the early 1990's), I think you can make a case for it accelerating after 2016

I can see it having an effect in the future...

On the other hand, with a return to child labour and collapse of universal healthcare, we may go back to birthrates of the 1850s. Rees-Mogg will be delighted, I'm sure.(though he's already done his bit for birthrate, as has Johnson...).

Overall UK longevity increases have stalled and the last few years showed a decrease (down to covid excess deaths). Within this, the rich are still show increases and the poor show clear decreases. I'm less optimistic than the ONS for most of the next decade, as the Care system and the NHS seem to be in big trouble.

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriage...

Zero fact based, but cancer kills a fair proportion of us eventually, early intervention saves lives. The waiting times for a gp, referrals, ops etc.. isn't shrinking, so I'd imagine that with lead in times, survival rates won't improve in the next 5-10 years. This ignores other time bombs like diabetes, hotter summers, increased costs of healthy food and a lack of affordable heating in winter. Attacked from all sides.

I think it's too early to tell.

You can't really calculate fertility rates accurately until say 30 after an event. This is because there's an age between 15 - 45 where women could have a child (typically, of course there are exceptions). You can calculate a General Fertility Rate year by year which is basically children born divided by number of women of childbearing age which is a pretty useless number as it can be rather misleading and volatile.

This is why I don't really understand how you can get fertility rates up to 2019. I guess anything after 1992 must be a prediction which gets more and more accurate as you get closer to 1992.

Second, whilst the number of EU immigrants has reduced since Brexit, the number of non EU immigrants to the UK has increased since Brexit. They don't quite cancel eachother out, but there's still a net immigration into the UK (before and after Brexit).

I don't know if EU or non EU people are more or less likely to stay and have families. Probably a bit early to tell.

I suspect the established immigrants will have been far more likely to be having kids than the newcomers. It's very obvious here, we did have ~5,000 eastern Europeans on island (mostly Latvians) and they're now down to ~1,500.  The new migrant labour sources of choice are Nigeria and Kenya (especially in hospitality). Because they're invariably dark-skinned they stand out like a sore thumb, and it's very obvious that they're not forming relationships with locals yet like the Latvians were.

Or increase wages since people would then pay more tax. With increasing automation, it shouldn't be necessary for as many people to work for everything to function, so rather than the race to the bottom, we could have a lower number of workers earning more money. Rather than minimum wage topped up by benefits (taking from the tax payer), we could increase wages and therefore have a higher tax income. Of course, for this to happen we need to have a tolerance of paying more for goods. But we would also have more tax income to pay doctors, the bin collectors and all other public service roles. 

But no, we will keep cutting taxes, reducing welfare payments, keep minimum wage too low to live on etc etc. 🤷

This is the concept behind universal basic income - Corporations will need to be taxed more to replace the tax revenue previously coming from their workers.

You are missing the point of the whole capitalist system (as I'm sure you know) which will merely allow increased profits from increasing automation to benefit the already rich.

We are not set up in the west (or maybe anywhere) to be an "equitable" society that has more automation, basic universal basic income and fewer but well-paid jobs. The capitalist system will strongly resist the move to such a society since it will appear to threaten those who gain most from that system.

I suspect that change will effectively be revolutionary, probably when a political movement (party) has enough support from the increasing number of "downtrodden" to gain power via the ballot box and radically change the whole tax/benefit system in a short space of time.

If the capitalist system uses force to suppress the increasing number of "downtrodden" (as per any number of futurist books, films, etc), then the likelihood of revolutionary change being violent will increase.

Edit: of course, all of this supposes that we have enough time to reach such a sociological change before some other tipping point (climate change famines/wars, no more pollinating insects for our crops, etc) changes the "game" to the extent that the above becomes irrelevant.

I seem to be in a bit of a dystopian mood 😁, maybe that should be a ☹

Easy. Just go to ONS and read how they work out estimates or pretty much exact figures for live births per 1000 people.

https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriage....

I don't see how it is misleading as they tell you what they calculate and how. It varies but does not look very volatile, it looks more like steady trends that persist for a decade timescale.

They will also break it down based on the country of parents birth. So for mothers born in the UK it is about 1.5, for those not 2. The decline since 2016 has actually been more pronounced in UK born mothers. For those not born in the UK it has been pretty constant, although CP still has a point in that EU countries like Poland have seen a 10% drop, but those births have been replaced by countries like Albania that have seen a significant increase. 

Not sure where you got that information from but a quick Google suggests it's not changed that much at all since 1997. 12.639 births per 1000 in 1997 and it only increased between 2003 & 2009 when the annual change was just less than 2%. Since 2009 the birth rate and annual change rate have been falling.

Source: https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/GBR/united-kingdom/birth-rate

I'll admit that I was looking at the number of births rather than the birth rate, but essentially we agree, it had increased prior to 2010, but has now fallen back to the level it was at the turn of the century? To me an annual change of 2% seems significant, but I might be wrong.