Like high cholesterol, population decline is a problem, but not in the way you might think

The prospect of population decline in Europe is commonly understood to be an important policy problem. Discussions and research typically focus on the level and the trend of demographic indicators. Can policies be designed which, by targeting the constrained optimisation of rational individuals, cause the indicators to change in the right direction? In this intervention, I argue that like a surrogate marker in medicine, a demographic indicator is not a meaningful endpoint: something that is a direct measure of health or, analogously, a healthy society. Treating population indicators as meaningful endpoints can, as history has shown, lead to great harm. In my view, it is this misconception that makes population decline a truly serious and terrifying problem. So yes, population decline is a problem, but not in the way you, or the people who pose this sort of question, might think.