[solidsnack9000]

In Japan, they are in fact closing down public services, including schools, because many towns are depopulating. Even if taxation and administration are centralized, when the population of an area decreases, it is hard to spend the same amount of money on services there, since the other areas have relatively more people and more costs.

The article actually doesn't make much of a case for its claim about America being ill-suited to handling a declining population and it doesn't actually examine other countries and how they've coped.

[jwells89]

One obvious advantage of centralization, though, is that the government is much better equipped to enact programs to keep towns afloat (whatever that entails). Red tape and obstructionism on the local level is minimal and is unlikely to cause issues.

In the US, if the federal government wants to put similar programs in place, in many ways they’re at the mercy of the states. Certainly out of 50 states some will be cooperative, but even that is subject to rotations of state politicians. This means that any measures to counter depopulation are going to be spotty in the short term and unstable in the long term, greatly limiting efficacy.

[solidsnack9000]

I guess I would question the value of that, if the fundamentals are such that any such programs and choices have so little effect.

Japan is highly centralized and yet what is so different about the depopulation situation there? It has been widely reported and actually there have been many links posted on HN about it.

The article seems to be making a big deal out of a minor factor, in order to sell a narrative about state centralization saving countries that have adopted it (the Economist is a UK periodical, and the UK was one of the latecomers to centralization). The USA, which is more like the UK used to be, serves as a kind of foil or cautionary example. Note the final sentence, warning us that decentralization leads to Trumpism.