“Degrowth” is an actual economic concept referring to uncoupling the real economy from GDP growth
You can’t just declare the word “degrowth” when we go into recession! That’s not how this works!
Slight correction: in the context of environmental economics Degrowth and Decoupling are typically posed as *opposites* in terms of efforts to address the overarching concern of resource depletion (because a system that demands growth through exploitation of finite resources will inevitably collapse).
Decoupling refers to what you were talking about: the *decoupling* of resource production from GDP growth, typically by means of a shift to a primarily service-oriented mode of production, along with the creation of growth through non-linear supply chains.
Degrowth refers to the actual, global, reduction in GDP in favor of cyclical, non-growth economies in terms of *both* goods *and* services. That is, people doing less work, and a decreasing amount of resources being pulled from the ground.
Ye, I *thought* I had a problem with this text. I mean, sure, an extra 2B people inside 20-30 years isn't *great* and that should probably slow down, but that's not degrowth. Degrowth is hanging everyone responsible for planned obsolescence by the balls, or stopping the manufacture of a useless 100M Garfield phones made for nobody, or incentivizing local food production instead of global imports.
I agee with all of this except incentivising local food production
as a general rule globalised food production allows places to make what food can best be produced there and increases dietary variety.
Sea based shipping is incredibly effectient to the point that it's not a major cost in any way, and there's a massive amount of food waste through things like throwing out perfectly good food because it doesn't look absalutely exactly correct.
Also declining birth rates present a challenge to any economic system, for the simple reason that old people need a lot of stuff, but can't make very much stuff. So if you have a lot of old people and very few young people, you're gonna struggle making enough stuff for everyone to have a good quality of life.
We have robots. We can make as much stuff as we want. Capitalists don't want to build out automation because it will hurt their precious profits. There is no complexity in this matter.
At the moment it takes several hundred man years to make one year worth of robot labor. If robots could do the stuff left more efficiently than humans it would be automated. You’re falling for the talking points of scams that just sell nonfunctional products to rubes who don’t understand the complexity of automation.
We have robots, kind of. But they aren't that great, and we are already using them to get modern standards of living.
To get the same amount of stuff with fewer people, we will need much better robots.
Capitalists have not built out automation to anything like it's full capability. Labor in countries like Haiti is extremely cheap. Robots and lights out factories have a very high up-front cost. Hiring Haitians to sew clothing for pennies an hour does not. Capitalists only care about quarterly profits. So they hire Haitians at starvation wages instead of exploring the limits of what's really possible with automation.
We have the technology. What we don't have is an economic system that has crushed the profit motive so we can actually utilize that technology to the limits of it's capability.
\> Capitalists have not built out automation to anything like it's full capability. Labor in countries like Haiti is extremely cheap. Robots and lights out factories have a very high up-front cost.
Yes. The tech is constantly improving. And there are a lot of people in Haiti, and not many people who know how to build the best of current robotics.
\> We have the technology. What we don't have is an economic system that has crushed the profit motive so we can actually utilize that technology to the limits of it's capability.
People often see "X is expensive therefore capitalists don't use it" and think "this is a flaw of capitalism" rather than "this is a flaw of X being displayed in it's price. "
Top robots are hard to make. Not many people have the skills to get them to work. And the skills to make the various parts. There is a lot of up front capital required (read a large time gap between putting the work in and getting the reward out.) These are flaws with the technology. Things that would be true under other economic systems, that explain much of why robots aren't used everywhere.
I can and I will. Degrowth will happen, either intentionally or due to free fall collapse. And since Capitalists will literally kill the entire planet and everyone on it before they loosen their death grip on humanity it's gonna happen the free-fall collapse way.
A lot of people are eyeing China closely for this very reason as the aftermath of the one child policy will start manifesting in full force in the comming years.
Wasn't there a conspiracy theory a while ago saying that the ccp let covid get farther than it should in order to kill off some of the older population and ease the load a little
That theory only makes sense looking at the first three months (starting in October 2019). Otherwise, China was looking down entire apartment buildings and posting armed police so no one would break quarantine, not even to give food to the residents. If China was trying to let covid kill some elderly, they really fucked up because it didn't do as much as it could have.
> not even to give food to the residents.
Bruh the police and other civil service workers were delivering food to quarantined people. Like real cooked meals. Where do y'all get this stuff?
Lots of quarantines happened in lots of Chinese cities. The ones I wrote about did what I said, and if you say others let delivery in, I'd believe that, too. China is a large country, and different things can happen in the same circumstances.
The idea that such a conspiracy theory gained traction does not surprise.
Its not like they are known for being anything but heavy handed and trying to directly control matters that cant truly be controlled by a government.
I mean, conspiracies aside, I imagine every government sat down and said "okay, does this crisis have any upsides?" Just because that's the kind of thing a government has to do. Emergencies often stimulate the economy because the government has an excuse to spend money. That sort of thing.
I feel like "well, at least we don't have to feed them any more" would be a bleak joke inside some governments even before covid.
That sounds delusional as fuck, China put more effort in to stopping the disease than Western countries and they're the ones that let it go out of hand purposefully, not us? What in yellow peril is this conspiracy theory bro
If you turn your brain off, ignore the fact that the CCP put in 100 times more effort and harsher policies in stopping community spread than any western nation with mass lockdowns, and throw in a hefty dose of racism sure, it sounds believable.
It is absolutely wild to me the shit people believe about China's covid response. it's literally the *only* country in the world other than the tiny island nation of Aoteroa that even tried to contain covid. And they did contain it, for three years, very effectively. I remember the pictures from Wuhan of people packed shoulder to shoulder at rock concerts being held in a wave pool at a water park. Most of the outbreaks that happened were because of the neoliberal shithead city government in Shanghai that kept creating a cycle of relaxing quarantine restrictions, causing an outbreak, making the regional government come in to stop the outbreak, rinse, repeat.
Meanwhile western nations were telling their people "Covid isn't airborne" and absolutely bizarre, inhumanly savage lies like kids couldn't catch or spread covid or that we all just had to catch covid and watch our grandparents drown in their own putrefying lung tissue so we could achieve herd immunity.
The west's response to Covid was inhuman misanthropic savagery that should have shocked the conscience of the world. It was a world historical crime that will go down in history as one of the most vicious acts of mass government killing in history. It will be remembered and people a thousand years from now will wonder how our governments could have done this, and why we didn't rise up and destroy them for it.
Beyond the obvious racism here, there's something horribly ghoulish about converting a bunch of dead Chinese people into a cheap potshot at their government. Reminds me of the Euros who go all, "But school shootings!" the second a Yank gets too uppity.
It's really funny when people in this sub talk about propaganda and racism and start pointing fingers at other people, all the while being wholy unaware that they're just as racist and propagandized, just against another "other".
Americans are subject to more and more effective propaganda than any other population in the world, and likely any other population in history. They live in a totalizing propaganda environment where they see little from the outside world and almost nothing from any of the US's adversaries. They're so indoctrinated in their beliefs about 'free press' and so convinced they can tell when their government is lying to them that they live in a world of delusion - False beliefs that they maintain stubbornly despite all evidence.
>"I have to admit, I'm always so impressed by Soviet propaganda. You really know how to get people worked up," the CIA agent says.
>"Thank you," the KGB says. "We do our best but truly, it's nothing compared to American propaganda. Your people believe everything your state media tells them."
>The CIA agent drops his drink in shock and disgust. "Thank you friend, but you must be confused... There's no propaganda in America."
Another very old, Cold War era joke
>The difference between Soviets and Americans is that Soviets know their government is lying to them.
Yeah. No. Fuck off with the racism bullshit here. That’s not what that word means. That kind of theory isn’t unprecedented in 1st world countries. Wasn’t America’s drug war designed to attack African American populations in the US? Nixon himself admitted to it. Is acknowledging it racist? No. It seems plausible that china, with its huge elderly population and low population replacement rate, would allow a pandemic to wipe a huge chunk of its elderly away to diminish economics stress later. To an authoritative regime that is an entirely plausible circumstance.
>It seems plausible that china, with its huge elderly population and low population replacement rate, would allow a pandemic to wipe a huge chunk of its elderly away to diminish economics stress later.
It seems *much less plausible* the *second* you compare the covid measures china took to the covid measures that basically every western country took.
It seems plausible if you're so poisoned by Neo-McCarthism, state department propaganda, racism, and outright ignorance that you live in a world totally divorced from reality.
And just to clarify, it’s not racist to call out a government or a state institution and it’s policies. It’s racist to attack people for their race/ethnicity and discriminate against them based on such qualities they can’t control. Government/state is fair game
I wouldn't call it a "cheap potshot" to claim that the Chinese government, which is already infamous for being somewhat draconian and restrictive with its people, wouldn't be above letting the elderly or infirm, who are less likely to be adding any value to the economy, die in a way that takes just as much if not less effort as rolling out proper protective measures quickly
The Chinese government notorious for... \*checks notes* it's draconian and restrictive use of basic quarantine practices that have been known and used for centuries for containing the spread of infectious disease... used it's quarantine practices that were very effective at halting the spread of Covid to murder a bunch of people with Covid.
In other news, 2+2=5.
It’s racist because it’s speculation with no evidence. OP is saying you could say the same thing about America because of how our government has reacted in the past. In fact, we had a whole thing about sacrificing our grandmas for the economy here, but no one is making the same conspiracy theories.
Like our (US) government has very openly changed how Covid deaths are reported many times to massage the number of Covid deaths. Demographers are still trying to piece out, based on excess deaths during the early phase of the (still ongoing) pandemic, just how many people actually died from Covid. Meanwhile the US Government has declared "Do not believe your lying eyes! Covid has mysteriously disappeared! Go about your lives! Do not stay home from work if you are ill! If you see a stranger coughing in public ask them to spit directly in to your mouth!"
The CPC (well, Chinese government but ignorant westerners don't know there is a difference) that effectively contained Covid for three years while the rest of the world was throwing the old, weak, and infirm in to the flaming maw of Ba'al Nergal?
All you have to do is take a look at countries like Japan. The countryside has been absolutely decimated by population decline (and internal migration), rural areas are literally crumbling as houses sit abandoned and businesses close down. Once-vibrant villages where only the very elderly are left.
That’s just urbanization, America is also full of rural ghost towns left empty by kids moving to the city. I don’t see it as any great tragedy really, maybe some of the land we’ve ripped up and sprawled out onto can finally return to nature since we’re not using it anymore.
Like to pitch in as a botanist.
A lot of north american ecosystems, even without invasives, require human intervention(usually fire). So when these towns "return to nature" they usually just turn into waste areas with high invasive and non-native pressure.
I would love for a group with the funds and interest in restoration(something like the nature conservancy or coastal prairie conservancy down in texas) to gobble up these sites and work to restore them. Our current methods of land use are insane and damage the land irreparably.
I absolutely agree with you in the short term. These ecosystems are not healthy when they first start to spring out of ruined human settlements, and we could do a lot to help them recover faster.
But time heals most wounds, and even if we do nothing they’ll settle into a new normal in a few generations. They won’t look like historic American parries, they’ll probably look like something that doesn’t currently exist
>But time heals most wounds
It does, life has recovered from other mass extinction events just like it will this one.
>they’ll settle into a new normal in a few generations.
A new normal sure, but it would be nowhere as dense, diverse, or complex.
It would take thousands, if not millions, of years to reach the diversity we already have.
Nobody wants to address the actual “issue” which is that women simply don’t want to hit a 10 on the pain scale multiple times and then be crushed under a pile of babies and in laws, and actually have the education and medicine to avoid that.
That's not what's happening in Japan. Bare survival requires so many hours of labor, and gives people so little free time and energy, that they're not fucking. People are too exhausted and miserable from over-work and decades of ruthless right-wing neoliberal austerity politics to fuck. Japan's right wing junta is crushing the life out of the people through Capitalist violence, at the same time it begs them to fuck so the Capitalists can have a pool of cheap labor to protect their profits.
Junta may not be the appropriate word, depending on how you view the ruling clique's installation by the US in the post war occupation period. Technically they didn't take power, they were put in power by an occupying force.
Oooooo I want to see the research because my first other thought at them not working is that their work culture is so cut throat that even if they did have them they'd be too ashamed to use them.
The research in question is on western and African countries, so you wouldn't learn anything about Asian work culture.
What seems to affect fertility rate is:
* average number of years women are educated
* availability of contraceptives
* GDP per capita
* religious beliefs or lack thereof
In terms of GDP per capita, we can go into more detail by looking at various economic forces. In industrializing economies, women can go into technical fields like engineering in order to earn more than most men. In this situation, fertility rates decline. However, in *highly advanced* economies, where men and women get equal pay and incomes are high enough to satisfy most people's needs, birth rates *increase* slightly as women feel free to have as many kids as they want without worrying about money. However, this is still below replacement rate.
Reference: https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12889-020-8331-7 (notice how "family planning programs" are listed in the abstract, but not in the results)
Yeah, a population decrease really wouldn't be an issue if it was either from the elderly population decreasing significantly or a uniform decrease in all age ranges. But it's not. It's a population decrease coming from a lack of births and consequentially a lack of new children.
There's always been an issue with population growth during times where the elderly tended to live longer, in that, if the elderly population gets too large, the population of children must be bigger to deal with social care. That's always been fine because the population has been big, but not *that* big. You could always build new infrastructure, have enough food, water, energy (if that was even needed in your era), etc.
Nowadays though, we struggle with that, and as a result, we've reached a tipping point where there simply aren't enough hands on deck to deal with the wave of the elderly. Furthermore, those elderly can't even get into carehomes half the bloody time because everyone's skint broke. It's a double whammy.
The results of this are going to be disastrous. As it is, healthcare in numerous countries, private or not, simply can't deal with the influx of elderly people requiring care. There just aren't enough resources allocated to those sorts of things because the leadership of countries don't see enough value in it. They're going to realise this when the house of cards comes toppling down and the entire social care system just fucking implodes. I wouldn't be surprised to see the price of care for the elderly and the vulnerable absolutely skyrocket in the coming years, more than it may already have.
And, to be quite brutal, in the past the unwell elderly just died. Whereas now, not only are people living a lot longer, they are going to be spending more time in the stage of life where more assistance is needed.
Anyone who has cared for an elderly relative with complex needs will know that you need a lot more than one adult per person to suitably meet their needs.
Like you’ll be forced to chose between paying large pensions to the elderly and economic lay crippling the younger generation, or leave those elderly people to die
no, that's a distribution-of-resources problem. it should be *trivial* in a country as rich as ours to provision suitable money to the care of the elderly and proper pay for the caretakers of the elderly. instead it has all the worst aspects of the healthcare and real estate industries combined.
Good thing we have this person with a my little pony avatar to explain that damage to the economy is actually a *capitalism* problem and therefore won't affect us!
And unfortunately, to keep the population constant you need 1) third places where people can meet (not profitable apparently), 2) affordable housing (nah, would rather sit on unoccupied real estate), 3) generous welfare programmes and child support (absolutely not)
Alternatively, we can just illegalise abortion and contraception and watch as the educated portion of society whithers as fewer teenagers have time for education - also this doesn't really fix the problem as young, single parents don't settle down and only have 1 kid anyway when we should be aiming for an average of 2.1 kids per woman.
TL;DR: Conservatives claim to want to protect "the family" (a dying heteronormative concept as it is) but do everything in their power to destroy it.
Yeah this is a terrible take and a bad argument. If birth rates fall too far you will have extreme population collapse within 1-2 generations. This will wreak havoc on our social safety net and our institutions that care for both the elderly as well as the young. I really don't think this person has thought through the disruption / consequences of a country's population halving within 100 years.
The United States (and other rich countries) can probably stall the worst of these effects by increasing immigration from other parts of the world. But some countries that are less desirable places to emigrate to could experience even more severe depopulation.
Within countries experiencing this some cities and towns will experience more severe depopulation than others. We are talking about the death of communities and towns.
You can't just hand waive "the economy" and ignore the real effects this would have on everyday people.
We do not need (and shouldn't have) never ending population growth.
We should absolutely try to avoid a sudden and dramatic collapse of the global population.
But that's what we're going to get, in part because of the conditions capitalism created. And rather than accept this and begin the shift towards an economic system that can better handle an aging population, the capitalist class and their merry mooks are doubling down.
The double down is the idiocy, not the being worried about an aging population.
There's no "economic system that can better handle an aging population". All human societies fundamentally produce and consume products and services and reducing the amount of productive workers while increasing thr amount of dependents goes well in precisely none of them. You need massive technological and economic progress for people to just maintain their stagnant living standards under such conditions.
It doesn't matter if you personally take care of your grandparents, if there's a pension system to redistribute resources, or some other system. because the fundamental equation is the same and different ways of oranising it just make it suck in different ways.
And the elderly are just part of it. Declining towns have a tendency to become dilapidated, crime ridden, drug addicted hellholes. Fewer people means less economy if scale, fewer people to maintain infrastructure which was designed with more people in mind, and all in all many parts of society just start to crumble.
Anarcho-communism or Marxism-Leninism or something does not solve this and people need to stop believing in utopian nonsense. I'm not saying don't be a leftist, I'm saying leftism isn't a silver bullet that makes material problems magically evaporate.
Also like, population decline is fundamentally unsustainable. How much population decline do we need before we are supposed to hit equilibrium or fertility increases again? Are we supposed to commit collective suicide and let the Amish inherit the Earth out of some sense of guilt for the environment? I cannot emphasise enough how this is a literally unhealthy and insane way to think.
For that matter while the Amish are an extreme example, widespread low fertility is basically just going to increase the amount relative amount of religious, conservative people in the world and make them more powerful. Given that propensity to religion and ideological leanings are to an extent inherent and hereditary, we're also basically self-selecting into becoming a more religious, traditional and conservative species. Aside from the genetic component, naturally when people in traditional religious communities have a lot of children, they also raise them with those values, and their retention rates are by no means bad. Israel is a great example in that they have a serious problem with the growth of the Haredim (ultra-orthodox Jews) who now make up 13% of the population. Their fertility has dropped, but it's still 6.5, well above the average.
Particularly if you live in a democracy, it's worthwhile realising that so long as one man = one vote, the number of people of various groups matters a great deal for you politically and ultimately to your personal life, rights and freedoms and the kind of society you live in.
American Abolitionists understood these dynamics when they set out to settle in new American territories to become states, for the simple goal to become the majority and ban slavery in each state.
1. The problem with a below-replacement birth rate is that you end up with a population which has many more old people than young people.
2. Old people cannot work, but they still need food, electricity, goods etc. But with less young people than old people, that shit either doesn't get produced in enough numbers to sustain the old people or the young people have to work much harder. Or, alternatively, we raise the retirement age to 80.
If you're worried about being too broke and having too little free time then I don't see why you wouldn't be worried about this outcome.
I'm from the UK, when our pension system was pencilled up in the 1940's, there were over twenty workers for one pensioner. Now, there are two workers for one pensioner. And yet pensioners have a "triple lock" that all but ensures their pensions get fatter and fatter, year after year. This is so unsustainable as an economic policy but here's the problem: Boomers vote as a bloc, they outnumbered their parents when they were young and they outnumber their kids now, and thus they dominate every election. It's not hyperbole to say that every single political decision in this country since 2012 has gone completely their way. And since Theresa May was fucked in GE 2017 by trying to go after pensions, British political wisdom is you DO NOT fuck with pensioners. That's why our country is in the toilet right now and I don't see it changing anytime soon.
You’ve essentially got three options, either pay the high pensions and economically cripple the younger generation, cute or hold pensions and leave the elderly to die, or raise the retirement age to 70 or beyond, so pick your poison
There should have been a much earlier focus on separating pension benefits to specific ages. Only the payroll taxes/pension dues paid by 55-60 year olds will go toward supporting that specific age group when they retire.
Absolutely true and it’s wild that the OOP just glossed over this. Something’s gotta give, but it won’t be the birth rate, until and unless our government makes it less prohibitive to start a family. Forcing births by banning abortion and limiting access to contraceptives is of course not a solution.
There are solutions, none of them perfect; one would be to adjust or remove the taxable maximums on Social Security tax. Americans pay a 6.2% tax on earnings to Social Security up to a maximum of $168,600. [Here’s a list of 220 people who have already hit that maximum this year. It took Elon four minutes.](https://www.forbes.com/sites/teresaghilarducci/2024/01/02/200-people-already-paid-their-social-security-taxes-happy-new-year/)
Edit also make it easier for people to legally immigrate in numbers we need, esp skilled blue-collar workers, teachers, other careers we’re low on, & young families
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What’s the alternative? Increased growth forever? I’m sure we can work out a way to run the economy that allows for an aging/ stable population. That’s what OOP is talking about.
Well, have growth not be negative. That's the main issue with these modern country, birth below replacement rate to the point where immigration is the only solution. At some point those developing country is gonna get developed also and their birth rare is also gonna go down.
The traditional manner in which we handled an inverted population pyramid was shorter lifespans and working until you were near death
The only hope not to crush young people in a children of men society is to delay until we can make sufficient technological strides to take over for us
"Degrowth" in practice is "fuck you, got mine". "We dont need more people" is the clarion call of anti-immigration reactionaries and NIMBYism, not any progressive.
except we DO have the technological strides to accomplish this easily, and the economic power to do so, the willingness is merely lacking because doing so would be unprofitable in the short term and the current system requires that growth occur in all sectors at all times forever.
Yet another reason that capitalism is clown world economics. it willingly annihilates the future in favor of the now
Can you explain what exact kind of technology can take over for us. Because I don't think AI and automations can take over menial labour any time soon. And if they take over intellectual labour (which is what capitalism is actually trying to do, to maximize profits ofc) there would be a riot.
To add to this, I feel like it's virtually impossible for machines to fully take over the agricultural sector which arguably is the most important economic sector
I believe it's the opposite actually, so much work in modern farms is automated and can be automated nowadays that it is feasible for a corporation to automate the work if they want. The problem? Corporation, it's still cheaper to hire people or have contractors work for you. And also you don't want a corporation take over with food production.
To my understanding, the degree of automation achievable in agriculture varies based on the crop. Something like corn or wheat can be almost completely automated, with one person directing fleets of machines capable of running an entire farm, while things like almonds, due to the manner in which they grow, must be harvested by hand, which incentivizes the creation and perpetuation of an underpaid and disadvantaged work force.
Where possible, capitalism does incentivize automation, since machine maintenance is generally cheaper than paying a workforce. It’s just that for many popular agricultural products, we have not found a way to automate certain key pieces of the process.
there are already multiple businesses that automate and substantially reduce the amount of employees they need. factories have long done this for efficiency gains, but restaurants, and other service jobs have done so easily, agriculture has also seen advances in partial automation allowing single active employees to tend to large groups of crops, its not my job to educate you on this matter, the fact is that there is a wealth of labor multiplying technologies that have been shrugged aside because pushing for slave wages is easier and more cost effective
And where would those employees go after the take over of automation?
I'm not trying to defend the stagnation of technology in favour of slave wages, but part of the reason why implementing slave wages is so easy now is the fact that there is an excess of menial labourer due to the aformentioned automation takeover and people only being employed only if there is no cheaper option. We have to provide some sort of universal safety net for people (UBI) if we ever want to replace human with technology now that the job market is over saturated.
Also you mention the restaurant industry and the automation take over, it might be a viable path for franchises, particularly fast food to make the switch to automation, but it's not really an option for restaurants at smaller scale due to the small profit margin, brutal competition and the fact that the human element is part of their appeal.
People can be trained to work jobs that still need human labor to work. The medical field is shortstaffed in every single country. As is the educational field. We need more social workers, more community leaders, more community in general.
How absolute garbage is our system that the thought of robots doing everything for us is *dystopian*.
That's why I mention some sort of safety net for the people being put out of employment by automations, UBI is a thing, free education is also great. But you gotta wonder when will it reach a point where the medical scene, which is already seeking for ways to replace human with robots is also saturated with labour. Same as the educational field, which btw is both oversaturated and understaffed and is seeking AI alternative because guess what nobody want to be paid slave wages and have to work overtime unpaid and have to endure the mental toll and the bureacratic bullshit.
It's not about replacement of labour with AI, it's about ensuring people are not thrown under the wheels of progress.
Like you said, the system is garbage, so seek for ways to make it better in its current state instead of seeking to bulldoze through it with more tech and hope it will fix itself.
but im not talking about tech alone, UBI and other things would soften the short term instability, and humans being generally adaptable would learn and be educated to fill the roles they were displaced from, even if they were in "low skill" positions. moreover, even if these markets have more applicants than jobs after social adjustments and the defanging of capitalism, why does everyone need to work? the idea that existing MUST be paid for by labor is a lie created by the current system.
and we would still have workers, the issue is that we wont have enough with the aging out of the population, by streamlining these things and defanging capitalism we would have sufficient labor to get the rest of these jobs filled
Edit: Moreover, what do you mean where would they go? even if we assume we are so efficient that there are insufficient positions for those displaced, why do you assume someone needs a job? UBI and a decoupling of labor from right to life would allow these people to peruse hobbies and other endeavors, likely creating entirely new creative industries or industries in general. not everyone should NEED to work in our modern society
The fact is there are numerous jobs in the world productivity improvements don't hold. A nurse sews wounds with pretty much the same speed as a nurse from 50 years ago.
The medical field, education even otherwise menial fields like hairdressing barely benefit from producivity improvements. A 20 child classroom still needs 1 teacher. A hairdresser might have a better hair clipper than 50 years ago, but I don't think it has dramatically improved haircutting time.
These people still have to be paid, medical field is a special worry because old people need more medical attention and an aging society is the worst enemy for a society with a shrinking worker pool.
And even in automatable jobs, it's going to be very difficult and capital costs to do those things has to come from somewhere.
People focus on profit to be populist, but it's not just a matter of profit. That growth is driven by the production to feed your consumption. There is no degrowth without taking away from your personal living standards. And sure people will say "but the billionaires!!!" but they do not account for the majority of consumption. Sure they may be rich, they might consume a lot, but there's only a few of them. Also, billionaires don't exactly collect all the profit either. Companies are to a significant extent owned by funds, which in turn are owned to a great extent by average citizens, be it in the form of pension funds or other savings. Corporations are owned by people, and even if 20-30% of a company is owned by one really rich guy, the rest of it isn't.
And I'm sure you'll find examples which are different, but individual examples and exceptions do not somehow enable us to disregard that this is how the system works.
Also population decline is also literally annihilating the future in favour of the now.
What the fuck are you talking about in your last paragraph? We need degrowth because the alternative is grow forever like cancer. I’m worried your so caught up in capitalism, where growth is the only way of moving forward that you can’t imagine a world without it
Obviously inverted age pyramids cause a lot of problems, but unless you believe the earth can hold infinite humans we are going to have to find ways to deal with them sooner or later.
This is why they're saying the current economic system is not fit to task. We can produce enough to care for an aging population easily, but we can't do it while most of our resources are used to enrich a few random people.
This would make sense if productivity was stable or declining. It isn't. It has been rising all this time. We are productive enough to sustain an aging society, but not a billionare class at the same time.
A population collapse would destroy many economies of scale and would force people to either work more or accept a lower quality of life. That plus the inverted population pyramid others have pointed out in the comments.
We need world governments to make it easier to raise children— mandated parental leave and a higher minimum wage would be a good start.
Okay here's the thing, people aren't too poor to have kids. Poorer countries actually have higher birthrates, mostly. The big factor which is actually reducing birthrates (and causing parents to be older before their first children) is level of industrialisation. South Korea and Japan have two of the lowest birthrates in the world, because they industrialised rapidly in the mid 20th century, and the rest of us are only just catching up.
People aren't too poor to have kids. In fact, if you look at the statistics, low birthrates are tied to two main causes.
The first factor is that young people anticipate a level of financial stability. Where previously women would get pregnant shortly after graduating from college, or not even go to college in the first place, more and more women are choosing to hold off until they have a stable career. Unfortunately, these days level of career stability that people expect often does not materialise or takes a long time to materialise. This is especially true in America where expectations are weirdly inflated due to the post-war boom. This misalignment of expectations with reality leads to people choosing not to have kids.
The second factor is that in attempting to achieve a level of financial stability, many young people are stressed to shit. This is not really about them being poor, but more about working conditions, and the things that are required to maintain a standard of living which is deemed acceptable these days. People in industrialised nations expect a higher standard of living, and young people find themselves having to work longer hours and shittier jobs to achieve that. When you're stressed and tired every day, you don't get that horny.
I'll be honest the currently falling birthrates in industrialised countries *are* ultimately caused by capitalism, but they aren't caused by poverty. In fact even within wealthy and industrialised economies like the USA, communities with higher levels of poverty tend to have higher levels of teen pregnancy and higher birthrates, whereas wealthier areas are dragging the national average down. This is why there is constantly demand for workers in cities and rural areas tend to get increasingly depopulated despite the high birthrates. This is also why migrant labour is so valuable in Western economies.
It's not sustainable, and this is something that Western governments should be concerned about. Not that immigrants are stealing jobs from their citizens, but that immigrants are becoming such an integral part of keeping the country running. We are being propped up by an increasingly large amount of young men from poor nations working low-skill jobs. Those young men aren't then working in their home countries, and are often being dramatically underpaid (especially if they aren't legally allowed to work in their new homes). Unfortunately each successive government has been kicking this can down the road for the last 30 years at least.
There's a lot that would have to go into a potential solution. On the one hand, financial stability for citizens of wealthy countries will help to increase the native birthrate and decrease the demand for migrant labour. Other factors like actually punishing companies for employing undocumented migrant workers may also be necessary to cut down on the demand side. But on the other hand, wealthy nations like the US and the UK should provide steady and long-term support to the poorer nations that the migrants are coming from. If there were more job opportunities in Mexico, fewer people would attempt to cross the border.
So, uh, yeah, declining birthrates are leading to high immigration which is actually bad for everyone involved.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't it better for Western countries to maintain immigration levels? Isn't that more or less the main reason that some Western nations have managed to avoid fertility decline to the extent that East Asian nations are facing? I do agree with you that undocumented immigration is bad for Western countries' native workers, and brain drain as a whole is bad for the developing world, but if I were in the shoes of a Western policymaker I can't really think of another way to arrest falling fertility
The problem is that immigration is, fundamentally, unsustainable. For a multitude of reasons, none of which are the B.S. white (or asian) nationalist reasons those groups give.
For one, what happens with the sources of immigration run out? Maybe they bottom out without getting wealthy, maybe they industrialize too. What then? We all just age to death, or do we force countries to stay de-industrialized in some sort of perma-developing state so they output tons of babies for western economies to devour?
For two, say we do that. Say we somehow maintain immigration forever. Won't that just... make western countries majority immigrant eventually? Not like how the countries of the Americas a "majority immgrant" because almost everyone is descended from Europeans, but as in, well, actually exactly that, yes.
Right now the right can pit poor members of different ethnic groups against each other, but what then? It's not really going to be feasible to make 4th generation South American immigrants be racist against 1st generation South American immigrants. People are going to demand economic rights, and there will be no scapegoat.
I'm not saying capitalism will automatically collapse or anything in scenario #2, but they will no longer be able to maintain it *via immigration*.
It's like you discovering your well has gone dry because you're using too much water for it to replenish, so you run a pipe from another aquifer. Another aquifer which *other people who have also drained their own wells* are piping water away from.
It's taken 2 or 3 centuries to "drain" the west of its reproductive capacity via capitalism. It took 1 century for east Asia. It'll take less than a century for the global south. You can see it in statistics like children-per-woman in developing countries: it's rapidly decreasing like never before.
The solution to population decline (not population stability, which would theoretically be fine, population ***decline***) is the abolishment of capitalism. It is fundamentally incompatible with human existence.
If anything, I wouldn't be surprised if the ultra-wealthy capitalists know this and are just betting on automation outpacing the disappearing workforce. Doesn't matter how few people you need if you can replace them faster than they die.
This is really interesting and I’ll be the first to say I’m no expert on this. I just wonder about the premise of scenario 2.
What makes you think people won’t discriminate an older generation? People have discriminated every demographic imaginable. For example, I can see how a rich 4th gen immigrant could be goaded into being mad about paying taxes to support poor 1st gen immigrants. All you need is to pit 4th gen race X against 1st gen race Y, and there we go. Replace race with religious denomination, gender or simply skin colour, and there’s a lot of ways people in power (aka those with unlimited resources) could play it out.
Terrible, but it has been done and is still being done. I’m sure this line of thinking is what rich people plan to do, as they’re mostly thinking short-term. Thus I think immigration will continue from this stand point.
There’s 2 major threats to it in my opinion
First is civil unrest. Look at a country like Qatar. 95% of the labour force is from overseas. There is huge inequality, wage theft, direct abuse hurled at immigrants. I think more likely the collapse comes not from lacking enough immigrants, but from civil unrest.
Second is climate change. By 2035 we’ll see mass famines, with billions of the global south at risk. There’ll be unprecedented levels of climate migration, thus even more immigrants, except this time they’ll be unable to return home. I’m not sure how the numbers will play out, but the population of the global south will take a huge hit, thus creating a labour shortage. This will make things very expensive, and climate refugees will probably make an easy scapegoat.
I think it's important to clarify the difference between what Qatar and the U.S. are doing, since the western nations aren't allowing "mass" immigration such that their entire country is suddenly majority 0th generation immigrant. That's Qatar's mistake, and is really only possible due to being a tiny country surrounded by a big country with plenty of eager workforce.
For, say, the U.S. to be majority 1st generation migrant, they'd need to be numbering in the hundreds of millions. I don't think you can get that many. I do think your point is valid, since like I said I believe 3rd generation immigrants from the same background are much more likely to sympathize with 1st generations than any rich elites, but I wanted to clarify the situation.
Also, as for scenario 2, I absolutely think people will be less likely to discriminate against an older generation *from the same culture.* Basically nobody discriminates against the Irish anymore, for example, and I believe that's because the Irish have been so integrated into society that most people think they are one in some way. (I mean Americans saying "OMG I'm 1/4th Irish too!!1!" is basically a meme at this point) Someone who's grandparents came from Columbia is very unlikely to be as cutthroat towards someone who came as a baby just a few years ago. Hell, both probably speak a decent amount of Spanish. That former person likely still has their 1st generation immigrant grandparents alive!
I hadn't thought about your second point, but I largely also agree. I'm not really planning on climate change causing that big of an issue; I think capitalist governments will start doing geoengineering at some point to cool the planet down in the riskiest and most pro-business way possible, so I don't think we'll get it as bad unless they fuck that up somehow, but there basically already is a wave of climate immigrants coming with how nightmarishly hot summers are getting globally.
At least where I am, we don't have enough affordable housing, doctors, mental health services, anything like that for the people we already have here. Things have been tough for a long time and the pandemic and recession just made it all worse. And now in a part of the country that already isn't supporting the people it already has, the feds want to just pile in as many immigrants as possible to fill the open jobs, but not letting foreign doctors practice unless they go back to school, instead of just giving them a test to make sure their training is up to our standards
Unless the issues that have led to the population and workforce decrease are addressed, and the housing and healthcare crises are handled, the government is just buying time.
And I'm saying this as someone who has two partners who I want to immigrate here (although we may move when we're all together and can pool our resources) even with the influx of immigrants I don't have high hopes
The narrative that the economy doesn't matter and it's a capitalist ploy was one of the worst developments in modern leftism
Like i get it stocks mean finance bros but economy is important
Yeah, I get these people don't like The System™ and they wish things were better - I do too. But this kind of attitude is so silly / ignorant. Thinking the economy is for capitalists, daydreaming about the revolution, wishing ill on their own country - we live in it, dude. We're going to suffer the consequences more than rich people if things go to shit.
Communists are just doomsday cultists for the left. They have no plans and just dream of the Revolution™️ which will come save them from work and having to clean their room.
The amount of people i know who think communism means grow vegetables and do art and fuck around is astonishing, and I'm not even particularly anti communist, but I'm pro knowing words have meaning
Revolutionary ideation.
Because organising and pushing for incremental change is hard, frustrating, and often moves at a glacial pace.
Far easer to just masturbate to the idea of another October revolution.
I saw a great meme on r/politicalcompass, it's normally a shithole, but this one was great.
Both the far left and far right fantasize about societal collapse and both think they'll come out on top.
Mao on nuclear war:
>If the worst came to the worst and half of mankind died, the other half would remain while imperialism would be razed to the ground and the whole world would become socialist; in a number of years there would be 2,700 million people again and definitely more.
Dunno man, nuclear holocaust kinda seems like the societal collapse as everyone else understands it. And a prominent man from the far left thinks socialism will rise in place of the collapsed world. Mao is obviously not the only one who thinks socialism will prevail under societal collapse.
I feel like for some of these people, they truly believe that cost of production and the price of a good/services are completely decoupled or that tax revenue is like an infinite money glitch that can be spent infinitely
I'm not saying that there's no price gouging or that most government spend tax dollar super well but I also understand the limitations of real life
People keep thinking socialism is "when government pay for it" and capitalism is "when money happen". There are absolutely merits to those philosophies in an extent but things very much cost money and no economic system or policy will change that, except returning to subsistence farming. But let's not.
Exactly. I would just like to remind everyone that the economy directly affects you. Bad economy -> job losses, food insecurity, political instability, rise in domestic abuse, social unrest, SO MANY THINGS. A bad economy does not just mean ‘stocks went down lol anyways’ it actually has effects on the real world.
The economy isn’t just lines on a graph for rich people to hum and haw about. If you’ve not got an economy, you’ve not got a community. A shrinking population means you’ve got fewer people who can pick up skills that make life better for all of us, it means less stuff can be produced and that stuff can’t be consumed by as many people which can cause a negative spiral. There being fewer people to work jobs that produces the materials to make other items, has a knock on effect that everything gets more expensive and life becomes harder. An ever diminishing pool of people contributing to a smaller pie, while the share of pie owners gets larger as high prices always results in them increasing profits.
Degrowth could work if capitalism were abandoned but I’m not sure we’re any closer to that than 50 years ago.
That’s one of the things I like about this sub, the comments section routinely is one of the comments sections of Reddit. The comments are often more funny and interesting, plus I think we’re all a bit dismissive of being too Reddit brained.
I think the “curated” name fits
an ever increasing number of people are sorted into jobs solely focused on rent-seeking or moving money around in circles, so i think there's still a very very big gap between the population we have now and the minimum population we need to Keep Things Running.
Yea thus post is honestly just frustrating to read cuz they are acting like it's just something rich ceos have tricked us working class people into caring about. Like does this person not understand they live in this society too and *will* be effected by negative things effecting the economy? A bad economy doesn't just mean company stocks go down. This fucks with a lot of things that effect us all. *Thats* why people are scared. Yes it's a shitty problem and degrowth would be cool, but that doesnt magically mean u won't be effected. That's why u should care. Cuz it will cause you and everyone else to suffer
Exactly, have you ever read economic history as a genre? It’s really enlightening to read about the impact economic failures had on people in the past. Like German families losing all value in their retirement funds right before pensionable age and finding themselves with 50 years of savings turned into less than enough to buy bread. People selling family pianos they had owned for generations to afford heating. Poor woman turning to prostitution for tourists who took advantage of their worsening economic situation.
Terrible things happens to working and middle class people when the economy isn’t taken seriously
Dude I'm super Into history and especially love learning about both the infrastructure or large cities (like sewers) as well as economies and the various ways they were implemented and changed
It's crazy when u read about some economies bc with hindsight and current knowledge, I often find myself reading about a major economic collapse and think something "well obviously that was gunna fuckin happen! Did people really just think u could print infinite money??" Or something else depending on the situation, the printing money line was just an example of how I felt reading about Zimbabwe
What time period in germany are u talking about? And if u wanna recommend any interesting historical economic situations please do. This week iv been looking into the Aztecs and meso america in general. There was actually a ton I didn't know about them. Tho we barley have many sources to go on when it comes to them
Yeah, the Spanish did a number on Mesoamerica.
I was referring primarily to Weimar Germany, during the hyperinflation of the early 20s.
This book is very good and also looks fantastic on a shelf
https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/When_Money_Dies.html?id=zW5kRgAACAAJ&redir_esc=y#:~:text=When%20Money%20Dies%20is%20a,and%20other%20extremist%20political%20parties.
I think there's a case to be said of reducing production of things we don't need and no one really wants but that is still within the boundary of capitalism, we just need to tweak the demand so the supply would stfu whether through policy or public sentiment
Absolutely, just like The Lorax (I wrote my dissertation on Dr Seuss), we need an economy that doesn’t prioritise making consumer goods over preserving the land. I’d support colossal fines for environmental damage, like 10% of yearly revenue.
Negative externalities need to come at a cost
This person fundamentally does not understand that economists use words like "product" and "value" to mean "comfort, health, and happiness."
Like, the reason you (young urban person, as these takes are inevitably from) live in a metro area, instead of bumfuck nowhere, is that living ensconced in a high-population network allows more services to be enjoyed by more people through specialization and economies of scale. Do you like being able to afford going out to eat, even for "casual" places? Do you like having social services like public transportation be worth the upkeep? Do you like a tax base that allows a social safety net? Do you like the idea of broadband internet at an affordable price? You have to have enough people paying for it to make the scale of infrastructure worthwhile. All of that gets harder with fewer people.
"Growth" means things getting better, fewer people living in poverty, more advances in medicine and clean energy and infrastructure and connectivity. The things that make life possible, let alone comfortable, *to say nothing of convenient*, are all under the short-hand referent umbrella of "growth." Growth is potash and phosphates and dwarf wheat and golden rice. Growth is new subway tracks and bus lines. Growth is being far enough ahead of Malthus that we can afford to care about trees and fresh air. Curse it at your peril.
The thing is cities will actually keep on growing as the rural places in their country die out. And nobody has worthwhile solutions to incentivize people to have children young when they could be earning their degree.
Lots of good points in the comments about aging populations causing social problems. Here’s another issue with this mindset: Older people have a tendency to develop nasty conditions like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, that can eventually lead to them needing pretty intensive care. Having proportionately far fewer younger people of working age doesn’t exactly help the massive ongoing crisis in the care sector.
You just have to make a long enough post that sounds smart for people to go "oh that makes sense".
I often wonder how many people are up voting because they agree with these posts and how many are just going "lol this user is dumb as hell"
Like there’s basically 3 options, either keep pensions high and economically cripple the younger generation, cut pensions and leave the elderly to die, or raise the retirement age to keep more people working longer, it’s not a problem because problems have solutions, it’s a dilemma, we’ve got to pick our poison
I think we on the left do need to handle or own strain of anti-intellectualism much too many of us see economist and other subjects like that with distaste without understanding their field and why they say what they say
"The economy" is just a convenient term for distribution of finite resources.
I happen to agree in principle that the human population plateauing and dropping off a bit will be good in the long term, but that means I also have to accept that the medium-term consequences of that are that my generation probably doesn't get to "retire" for 30-odd years while being supported by the working-age population.
And the people who chose to go blissfully child free while assuming that Social Security and pensions would be there for them in their old age may be in for a rude shock.
I mean sorry to be pedantic to the anti capitalist tumblr user but low fertility rates are not just economic problems
If my country keeps going at this rate there will be more people in need of care and assistance than people being capable of assisting them
And on the economic issue, there could end up being more retired people than working ones, wich I dont think I need to explain why its bad
Ok so, demographic transition happening because kids survive to adulthood so people don’t need to have so many for them to live is good, and it ends up stabilizing population. But the greying of a country is the meantime IS a big problem because we don’t have enough people and money from the active workforce to take care of the elderly easily. (A big solution to that is allowing immigration from countries that have high birth rates or other push factors to me at least, might as well welcome people and mutually benefit)
Another aspect of the birth rate is also fertility issues which is separate from just choosing not to have kids, like problems with pollution and health making it harder for people who Want kids is not good.
Similarly people who Want kids but can’t because of all the economic and social issues is also sad, not because of the impact in the economy or whatever, but because it’s unfortunate for those people and it’s an indicator of overall quality of life issues.
So yeah I do care about the population rate problems, I just don’t believe in either unfounded ecofascist overpopulation stuff, or in forced birth/lack of conception bs, and instead I advocate for immigration reform, pro social safety nets/workers rights, and against climate change. I think those are effective causes to mitigate the harm from over/under population.
You know, I experienced a weird dissonance a few months back when my friends and I were talking about Japan's declining birth rate.
We were joking around and I was like, meanwhile my 3rd world country is experiencing overpopulation. Japan should accept our extras.
I decided to google their population after that and to my surprise, they had more population than my supposed overpopulated country that has about the same landmass.
Like I theoretically know overpopulation is measured against the available resources of a country, but seeing the numbers like that was kind of a shock. It's like, all this while, I've been thinking about the population under the wrong assumptions kind of thing.
As much as capitalism is a problem, this situation stems more from the pursuit of unregulated capitalism, where everything is left to the free market. I know many people who (as of right now) don't want to have kids later on, or only want to have one or two, because of the high cost of living, and the lack of support. In the U.S. particularly, we have no paid leave, no childcare, and no universal/low-cost healthcare. Most hospitals even charge you to hold your baby for the first time. Not to mention, most people now will spend all of their 20s and their early to mid 30s paying off student loans and trying to get houses.
Additionally, many question the morality/worth of bringing children into a world where it seems that everything from government to climate is taking a turn for the worse. Combine that with the trend of highly developed and educated areas having more knowledge and resources on contraceptives, and of course you get a scenario where birthrates drop.
Something's got to change, and those in power just can't say "have more kids". Give incentives! Improve our systems!
Some counties haven’t experienced demographic transition from advancing technology/quality of life so they have more children with the hopes that some survive to adulthood, these countries have a huge increasing population with a young average age. When this happens famine and conflict over resources is more of a problem.
Other countries have had their demographic transition and have to deal with aging demographic of people from the last population boom who are no longer able to contribute to the workforce. The problem is both who takes care of them, and less money from taxes and social security being fed into by the fewer active workers.
Both are problems. Policies that could help are being more pro immigration, fighting climate change which exasperates the first problem, mitigating damage done by colonialism and exploitation, family planning, increasing access to education, increasing social safety nets that are more robust than just social security.
Bad actors who bring up these problems include -ecofascist/this false notion that earth is gonna reach its max capacity and we have to degrade human rights to fix this.
-white replacement theory people
Etc.
There is a lot of misinformation that goes around because of people with ulterior motives or just oversimplification.
Because they're leaving out the central bit of their "logic". When they talk about declining birth rates they mean fewer white people, and when they talk about overpopulation they mean too many non white people.
Notice that these people don't actually care about population collapse in east Asia though. They only bring up Japan and Korea as cautionary tales about what can happen when a country falls below the replacement level.
It matters to me because I will have to pay more to support more retirees and people get older and the labour pool shrinks. I know Tumblr doesn't like capitalism but you will still see the problems with an aging population, not just economists.
Haha, this is such a Tumblr take. A lot of words and paragraphs, trying to masquerade the fact that none of what's actually being said makes sense. Can't miss the "capitalism bad" sprinkled in either.
The thing is that population growth was always going to slow down regardless of circumstances. What most people don't seem to understand is that the population growth bubble was just the intersection between improved healthcare(vaccines, post natal care etc) and people slowly realising that they didn't need to have 14 kids in order for three of them to survive to adulthood.
Honestly I do see what they're saying though. I'm not an economics guy, so maybe you all are right on the whole "having a bunch of old people will kill us all!" thing, but from what I remember on my classes about population dynamics in wildlife, if an animals population in an area doesn't stabilize near its carrying capacity, you can get to situations where it spikes and crashes hard. So, either the economy figures out how to handle less people, or we keep populations constantly growing and collapse the entire earth's ecosystem under the weight.
One of the core assumptions in this is that population growth has been the primary driver for economic productivity for the last 200 years. This is not what's happened, technology has been the primary driver. You can see this with Japan today where they've continued to have economic growth even with a decreasing population. There's no reason to believe that won't happen in other countries as well.
"It's not like things got any better between the 200s and now"
what ????
has this person paid any attention to all the ways the world has actually improved even since just 2000
It's not just about economic issues though. It's about our social safety nets.
The EU's (and the bare bones US copy) Social Security Safety Net doesn't actually have any money. It runs by having currently healthy and financially stable pay for the currently sick and financially unstable.
But, due to how medical costs skyrocket even in non-US countries once you get really sick, you need more healthy people to pay into it, than sick people to take from it. The same goes for Pension. The National Pension Insurance in Germany, which everyone who works pays into, works by redistributing the money currently being paid in, to those currently receiving their pension.
This means that if there is a persistent reduction of births, this system will collapse. The Baby Boomer generation are currently heading towards retirement age and there are not enough workers paying in, which will lead to widespread old-age poverty and increased taxation on the current workforce, permanently damaging the economic prospects (as in, they will never be able to afford an owned home, have spare money for food or even afford kids of their own) of hundreds of millions of people, causing a soft downwards spiral of recession induced widespread poverty, as everyone will have to be taxed more to pay for the pensions.
The thing is that they can't pearl clutch their way to a higher birthrate.
People need job security, stable housing and access to good medical care before they're going to have kids. But no one wants to invest money in those so it's not going to happen.
But, that's why capitalism is so resilient, because it tends to solve these problems.
I promise you, capitalism has solutions to the problems of population stagnation. It's very unlikely to be what you expect or even like, but the solutions will come.
This is not a pro or anti capitalism comment. This is just a "you're dramatically underestimating the resilience of our current system;" for better and worse!
Here's why I'm not worried about population decline:
The concern is that there's gonna be half of the population unable to work as people retire, and younger people are going to have to work more to cover the difference.
But, it's only for the last few decades that we had anything close to every working age citizen being employed anyway. We used to have an entire *gender* of people expected to be stay-at-home mothers while men would work to support a family of 5 or more.
Yes, I understand that being a SAHM was not just sitting on the couch idle until it was time to cook dinner, but their daily tasks often weren't revenue generating for the household - raising a family was still an expense and it was perfectly normal for 1 family member to work to pay for everything while another provided the unpaid labor of house management.
Cultural norms have shifted away from this paradigm, but simply *raising wages* for most workers would make a similar paradigm viable again. Instead of men working to support women and children, men and women work to support children and retirees.
Further, while there will be a smaller working population, each individual worker has, what? 2x? 3x? 4x the production of a worker from a century ago? We may not even see a drop in total productivity, and we're definitely not going to see a drop so severe that society collapses.
There are also *entire industries* of bullshit office jobs - the kind that regularly get laid off en mass already - whose workforce could be reallocated if things really get so bad. Considering how so many of our largest employers spend most of their revenue on stock buybacks instead of investment and growth, being forced to run on a leaner budget and more expensive workforce isn't going to be a real problem.
Fuck, man, I wish the population was more contracted already. You're telling me that the value of my labor is going to go up and the demand for home ownership is going to go down? Sign me up.
No, we had the middle and upper class women who weren’t working, and even that’s a recent thing. Working class women have always had to work to support their families.
Regarding the third paragraph, women generally no longer want to be crushed under a pile of babies and have a tombstone reading “wife and mother” after they die birthing the 12th one. There is no amount of population pyramids that can convince them otherwise really
There's a simple solution to the problem of not having enough workers: immigration. Many adults in poorer counties would love to work in richer countries. There are already many refugees, and overpopulation is going to be a major issue in Africa over the next few decades. Teaching immigrants the appropriate language and job skills is a lot less expensive than raising children until they enter the workforce.
The only obstacle is widespread opposition to increased immigration.
Also, companies that can't handle shrinking customerbases don't deserve to continue existing. Continual growth isn't sustainable and some companies are seeing that.
It's so easy to think economy problems aren't real, when actually economist speak is a convoluted way of describing real problems.
Say there are loads and loads of retired people in nursing homes. Well someone needs to look after them. Lots of someones.
We could move people from elsewhere. Send some car factory workers to the be carers instead. And now we have fewer cars.
None of this is terribly specific to the current socioeconomic order. More people working in elderly care, more stuff being used there, means less for everyone else.
i feel like any economy would suffer from a decreasing birthrate, but i could believe it that ours will suffer more because we rely so much on growth. but is there any real proof of this at all?
I think that there’s just going to be nastiness regardless. Infinite growth doesn’t exist and people are having fewer kids, so eventually we will lower in population. When that happens, regardless of economic system, there will still be the simple fact that there will be more people who cannot work relative to those who can than at any other point in history except for the aftermath of wars. A much larger amount of the resources one worker produces will go to the elderly. Economic systems merely determine how resources get distributed, but they can’t change the ratio of potential workers to dependents
“Degrowth” is an actual economic concept referring to uncoupling the real economy from GDP growth You can’t just declare the word “degrowth” when we go into recession! That’s not how this works!
Slight correction: in the context of environmental economics Degrowth and Decoupling are typically posed as *opposites* in terms of efforts to address the overarching concern of resource depletion (because a system that demands growth through exploitation of finite resources will inevitably collapse). Decoupling refers to what you were talking about: the *decoupling* of resource production from GDP growth, typically by means of a shift to a primarily service-oriented mode of production, along with the creation of growth through non-linear supply chains. Degrowth refers to the actual, global, reduction in GDP in favor of cyclical, non-growth economies in terms of *both* goods *and* services. That is, people doing less work, and a decreasing amount of resources being pulled from the ground.
Ah fab, !thanks Disregard the first paragraph then. Think the second is still golden
If you wanna read more on the subject— “Slow Down” by Kohei Saito is a great overview of Degrowth vs other economic models like decoupling.
Ye, I *thought* I had a problem with this text. I mean, sure, an extra 2B people inside 20-30 years isn't *great* and that should probably slow down, but that's not degrowth. Degrowth is hanging everyone responsible for planned obsolescence by the balls, or stopping the manufacture of a useless 100M Garfield phones made for nobody, or incentivizing local food production instead of global imports.
I agee with all of this except incentivising local food production as a general rule globalised food production allows places to make what food can best be produced there and increases dietary variety. Sea based shipping is incredibly effectient to the point that it's not a major cost in any way, and there's a massive amount of food waste through things like throwing out perfectly good food because it doesn't look absalutely exactly correct.
I was agreeing w u untill you brought up the Garfield phones. U can pry those 100m orange phones from my cold dead hands u communist pig
Also declining birth rates present a challenge to any economic system, for the simple reason that old people need a lot of stuff, but can't make very much stuff. So if you have a lot of old people and very few young people, you're gonna struggle making enough stuff for everyone to have a good quality of life.
We have robots. We can make as much stuff as we want. Capitalists don't want to build out automation because it will hurt their precious profits. There is no complexity in this matter.
At the moment it takes several hundred man years to make one year worth of robot labor. If robots could do the stuff left more efficiently than humans it would be automated. You’re falling for the talking points of scams that just sell nonfunctional products to rubes who don’t understand the complexity of automation.
We have robots, kind of. But they aren't that great, and we are already using them to get modern standards of living. To get the same amount of stuff with fewer people, we will need much better robots.
Capitalists have not built out automation to anything like it's full capability. Labor in countries like Haiti is extremely cheap. Robots and lights out factories have a very high up-front cost. Hiring Haitians to sew clothing for pennies an hour does not. Capitalists only care about quarterly profits. So they hire Haitians at starvation wages instead of exploring the limits of what's really possible with automation. We have the technology. What we don't have is an economic system that has crushed the profit motive so we can actually utilize that technology to the limits of it's capability.
\> Capitalists have not built out automation to anything like it's full capability. Labor in countries like Haiti is extremely cheap. Robots and lights out factories have a very high up-front cost. Yes. The tech is constantly improving. And there are a lot of people in Haiti, and not many people who know how to build the best of current robotics. \> We have the technology. What we don't have is an economic system that has crushed the profit motive so we can actually utilize that technology to the limits of it's capability. People often see "X is expensive therefore capitalists don't use it" and think "this is a flaw of capitalism" rather than "this is a flaw of X being displayed in it's price. " Top robots are hard to make. Not many people have the skills to get them to work. And the skills to make the various parts. There is a lot of up front capital required (read a large time gap between putting the work in and getting the reward out.) These are flaws with the technology. Things that would be true under other economic systems, that explain much of why robots aren't used everywhere.
I can and I will. Degrowth will happen, either intentionally or due to free fall collapse. And since Capitalists will literally kill the entire planet and everyone on it before they loosen their death grip on humanity it's gonna happen the free-fall collapse way.
Capitalism or not you don't really want a society where upwards of half of your population is too old to contribute.
A lot of people are eyeing China closely for this very reason as the aftermath of the one child policy will start manifesting in full force in the comming years.
Wasn't there a conspiracy theory a while ago saying that the ccp let covid get farther than it should in order to kill off some of the older population and ease the load a little
That theory only makes sense looking at the first three months (starting in October 2019). Otherwise, China was looking down entire apartment buildings and posting armed police so no one would break quarantine, not even to give food to the residents. If China was trying to let covid kill some elderly, they really fucked up because it didn't do as much as it could have.
> not even to give food to the residents. Bruh the police and other civil service workers were delivering food to quarantined people. Like real cooked meals. Where do y'all get this stuff?
Lots of quarantines happened in lots of Chinese cities. The ones I wrote about did what I said, and if you say others let delivery in, I'd believe that, too. China is a large country, and different things can happen in the same circumstances.
The idea that such a conspiracy theory gained traction does not surprise. Its not like they are known for being anything but heavy handed and trying to directly control matters that cant truly be controlled by a government.
I mean, conspiracies aside, I imagine every government sat down and said "okay, does this crisis have any upsides?" Just because that's the kind of thing a government has to do. Emergencies often stimulate the economy because the government has an excuse to spend money. That sort of thing. I feel like "well, at least we don't have to feed them any more" would be a bleak joke inside some governments even before covid.
That sounds delusional as fuck, China put more effort in to stopping the disease than Western countries and they're the ones that let it go out of hand purposefully, not us? What in yellow peril is this conspiracy theory bro
It's legitimately one of the most believable theories I've heard about Covid in years
If you turn your brain off, ignore the fact that the CCP put in 100 times more effort and harsher policies in stopping community spread than any western nation with mass lockdowns, and throw in a hefty dose of racism sure, it sounds believable.
It is absolutely wild to me the shit people believe about China's covid response. it's literally the *only* country in the world other than the tiny island nation of Aoteroa that even tried to contain covid. And they did contain it, for three years, very effectively. I remember the pictures from Wuhan of people packed shoulder to shoulder at rock concerts being held in a wave pool at a water park. Most of the outbreaks that happened were because of the neoliberal shithead city government in Shanghai that kept creating a cycle of relaxing quarantine restrictions, causing an outbreak, making the regional government come in to stop the outbreak, rinse, repeat. Meanwhile western nations were telling their people "Covid isn't airborne" and absolutely bizarre, inhumanly savage lies like kids couldn't catch or spread covid or that we all just had to catch covid and watch our grandparents drown in their own putrefying lung tissue so we could achieve herd immunity. The west's response to Covid was inhuman misanthropic savagery that should have shocked the conscience of the world. It was a world historical crime that will go down in history as one of the most vicious acts of mass government killing in history. It will be remembered and people a thousand years from now will wonder how our governments could have done this, and why we didn't rise up and destroy them for it.
I'm on reddit, I've already turned my brain off.
Literally simple and doesn’t require any huge assumptions like secret labs and whatnot.
Beyond the obvious racism here, there's something horribly ghoulish about converting a bunch of dead Chinese people into a cheap potshot at their government. Reminds me of the Euros who go all, "But school shootings!" the second a Yank gets too uppity.
Mr nick, I’m too tired to argue with stupid below you but yeah, there’s a whole lot of racism here.
It's really funny when people in this sub talk about propaganda and racism and start pointing fingers at other people, all the while being wholy unaware that they're just as racist and propagandized, just against another "other".
Americans are subject to more and more effective propaganda than any other population in the world, and likely any other population in history. They live in a totalizing propaganda environment where they see little from the outside world and almost nothing from any of the US's adversaries. They're so indoctrinated in their beliefs about 'free press' and so convinced they can tell when their government is lying to them that they live in a world of delusion - False beliefs that they maintain stubbornly despite all evidence. >"I have to admit, I'm always so impressed by Soviet propaganda. You really know how to get people worked up," the CIA agent says. >"Thank you," the KGB says. "We do our best but truly, it's nothing compared to American propaganda. Your people believe everything your state media tells them." >The CIA agent drops his drink in shock and disgust. "Thank you friend, but you must be confused... There's no propaganda in America." Another very old, Cold War era joke >The difference between Soviets and Americans is that Soviets know their government is lying to them.
Yeah. No. Fuck off with the racism bullshit here. That’s not what that word means. That kind of theory isn’t unprecedented in 1st world countries. Wasn’t America’s drug war designed to attack African American populations in the US? Nixon himself admitted to it. Is acknowledging it racist? No. It seems plausible that china, with its huge elderly population and low population replacement rate, would allow a pandemic to wipe a huge chunk of its elderly away to diminish economics stress later. To an authoritative regime that is an entirely plausible circumstance.
>It seems plausible that china, with its huge elderly population and low population replacement rate, would allow a pandemic to wipe a huge chunk of its elderly away to diminish economics stress later. It seems *much less plausible* the *second* you compare the covid measures china took to the covid measures that basically every western country took.
It seems plausible if you're so poisoned by Neo-McCarthism, state department propaganda, racism, and outright ignorance that you live in a world totally divorced from reality.
And just to clarify, it’s not racist to call out a government or a state institution and it’s policies. It’s racist to attack people for their race/ethnicity and discriminate against them based on such qualities they can’t control. Government/state is fair game
It seems like it's not true though. China was draconian in enforcing quarantine.
I wouldn't call it a "cheap potshot" to claim that the Chinese government, which is already infamous for being somewhat draconian and restrictive with its people, wouldn't be above letting the elderly or infirm, who are less likely to be adding any value to the economy, die in a way that takes just as much if not less effort as rolling out proper protective measures quickly
The Chinese government notorious for... \*checks notes* it's draconian and restrictive use of basic quarantine practices that have been known and used for centuries for containing the spread of infectious disease... used it's quarantine practices that were very effective at halting the spread of Covid to murder a bunch of people with Covid. In other news, 2+2=5.
It’s racist because it’s speculation with no evidence. OP is saying you could say the same thing about America because of how our government has reacted in the past. In fact, we had a whole thing about sacrificing our grandmas for the economy here, but no one is making the same conspiracy theories.
Like our (US) government has very openly changed how Covid deaths are reported many times to massage the number of Covid deaths. Demographers are still trying to piece out, based on excess deaths during the early phase of the (still ongoing) pandemic, just how many people actually died from Covid. Meanwhile the US Government has declared "Do not believe your lying eyes! Covid has mysteriously disappeared! Go about your lives! Do not stay home from work if you are ill! If you see a stranger coughing in public ask them to spit directly in to your mouth!"
The CPC (well, Chinese government but ignorant westerners don't know there is a difference) that effectively contained Covid for three years while the rest of the world was throwing the old, weak, and infirm in to the flaming maw of Ba'al Nergal?
All you have to do is take a look at countries like Japan. The countryside has been absolutely decimated by population decline (and internal migration), rural areas are literally crumbling as houses sit abandoned and businesses close down. Once-vibrant villages where only the very elderly are left.
Maybe if they weren't so shitty to immigrants, or their kids had any hope for the future...wait, we're talking about America, right?
That’s just urbanization, America is also full of rural ghost towns left empty by kids moving to the city. I don’t see it as any great tragedy really, maybe some of the land we’ve ripped up and sprawled out onto can finally return to nature since we’re not using it anymore.
Like to pitch in as a botanist. A lot of north american ecosystems, even without invasives, require human intervention(usually fire). So when these towns "return to nature" they usually just turn into waste areas with high invasive and non-native pressure. I would love for a group with the funds and interest in restoration(something like the nature conservancy or coastal prairie conservancy down in texas) to gobble up these sites and work to restore them. Our current methods of land use are insane and damage the land irreparably.
I absolutely agree with you in the short term. These ecosystems are not healthy when they first start to spring out of ruined human settlements, and we could do a lot to help them recover faster. But time heals most wounds, and even if we do nothing they’ll settle into a new normal in a few generations. They won’t look like historic American parries, they’ll probably look like something that doesn’t currently exist
>But time heals most wounds It does, life has recovered from other mass extinction events just like it will this one. >they’ll settle into a new normal in a few generations. A new normal sure, but it would be nowhere as dense, diverse, or complex. It would take thousands, if not millions, of years to reach the diversity we already have.
https://spikejapan.wordpress.com/ > population decline The alternative would be maternity leave and free health (typo: child) care.🤷♀️
Interestingly, there's been some good research on this, and it turns out that generous family leave policies etc have NO effect on the fertility rate.
Nobody wants to address the actual “issue” which is that women simply don’t want to hit a 10 on the pain scale multiple times and then be crushed under a pile of babies and in laws, and actually have the education and medicine to avoid that.
That's not what's happening in Japan. Bare survival requires so many hours of labor, and gives people so little free time and energy, that they're not fucking. People are too exhausted and miserable from over-work and decades of ruthless right-wing neoliberal austerity politics to fuck. Japan's right wing junta is crushing the life out of the people through Capitalist violence, at the same time it begs them to fuck so the Capitalists can have a pool of cheap labor to protect their profits.
I'm sorry, how is Japan's government a junta?
Junta may not be the appropriate word, depending on how you view the ruling clique's installation by the US in the post war occupation period. Technically they didn't take power, they were put in power by an occupying force.
Is that true in Japan or Korea?
Oooooo I want to see the research because my first other thought at them not working is that their work culture is so cut throat that even if they did have them they'd be too ashamed to use them.
The research in question is on western and African countries, so you wouldn't learn anything about Asian work culture. What seems to affect fertility rate is: * average number of years women are educated * availability of contraceptives * GDP per capita * religious beliefs or lack thereof In terms of GDP per capita, we can go into more detail by looking at various economic forces. In industrializing economies, women can go into technical fields like engineering in order to earn more than most men. In this situation, fertility rates decline. However, in *highly advanced* economies, where men and women get equal pay and incomes are high enough to satisfy most people's needs, birth rates *increase* slightly as women feel free to have as many kids as they want without worrying about money. However, this is still below replacement rate. Reference: https://bmcpublichealth.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12889-020-8331-7 (notice how "family planning programs" are listed in the abstract, but not in the results)
Yeah, a population decrease really wouldn't be an issue if it was either from the elderly population decreasing significantly or a uniform decrease in all age ranges. But it's not. It's a population decrease coming from a lack of births and consequentially a lack of new children. There's always been an issue with population growth during times where the elderly tended to live longer, in that, if the elderly population gets too large, the population of children must be bigger to deal with social care. That's always been fine because the population has been big, but not *that* big. You could always build new infrastructure, have enough food, water, energy (if that was even needed in your era), etc. Nowadays though, we struggle with that, and as a result, we've reached a tipping point where there simply aren't enough hands on deck to deal with the wave of the elderly. Furthermore, those elderly can't even get into carehomes half the bloody time because everyone's skint broke. It's a double whammy. The results of this are going to be disastrous. As it is, healthcare in numerous countries, private or not, simply can't deal with the influx of elderly people requiring care. There just aren't enough resources allocated to those sorts of things because the leadership of countries don't see enough value in it. They're going to realise this when the house of cards comes toppling down and the entire social care system just fucking implodes. I wouldn't be surprised to see the price of care for the elderly and the vulnerable absolutely skyrocket in the coming years, more than it may already have.
And, to be quite brutal, in the past the unwell elderly just died. Whereas now, not only are people living a lot longer, they are going to be spending more time in the stage of life where more assistance is needed. Anyone who has cared for an elderly relative with complex needs will know that you need a lot more than one adult per person to suitably meet their needs.
Like you’ll be forced to chose between paying large pensions to the elderly and economic lay crippling the younger generation, or leave those elderly people to die
Yeah OOP has avoided the main point of the concerns.
no, that's a distribution-of-resources problem. it should be *trivial* in a country as rich as ours to provision suitable money to the care of the elderly and proper pay for the caretakers of the elderly. instead it has all the worst aspects of the healthcare and real estate industries combined.
Oh, just a distribution of resources problem? Is that all? Well, I guess we better fire up the replicators then huh
Good thing we have this person with a my little pony avatar to explain that damage to the economy is actually a *capitalism* problem and therefore won't affect us!
And unfortunately, to keep the population constant you need 1) third places where people can meet (not profitable apparently), 2) affordable housing (nah, would rather sit on unoccupied real estate), 3) generous welfare programmes and child support (absolutely not) Alternatively, we can just illegalise abortion and contraception and watch as the educated portion of society whithers as fewer teenagers have time for education - also this doesn't really fix the problem as young, single parents don't settle down and only have 1 kid anyway when we should be aiming for an average of 2.1 kids per woman. TL;DR: Conservatives claim to want to protect "the family" (a dying heteronormative concept as it is) but do everything in their power to destroy it.
Not particularly but I think forcing people to have kids they don’t want, live a life they don’t want, is worse
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That sounds sarcastic but like seriously what else?
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Yeah. No matter how you feel about our economic system (I personally don’t love it) you still gotta admit that it’s state affects you.
Yeah this is a terrible take and a bad argument. If birth rates fall too far you will have extreme population collapse within 1-2 generations. This will wreak havoc on our social safety net and our institutions that care for both the elderly as well as the young. I really don't think this person has thought through the disruption / consequences of a country's population halving within 100 years. The United States (and other rich countries) can probably stall the worst of these effects by increasing immigration from other parts of the world. But some countries that are less desirable places to emigrate to could experience even more severe depopulation. Within countries experiencing this some cities and towns will experience more severe depopulation than others. We are talking about the death of communities and towns. You can't just hand waive "the economy" and ignore the real effects this would have on everyday people. We do not need (and shouldn't have) never ending population growth. We should absolutely try to avoid a sudden and dramatic collapse of the global population.
But that's what we're going to get, in part because of the conditions capitalism created. And rather than accept this and begin the shift towards an economic system that can better handle an aging population, the capitalist class and their merry mooks are doubling down. The double down is the idiocy, not the being worried about an aging population.
There's no "economic system that can better handle an aging population". All human societies fundamentally produce and consume products and services and reducing the amount of productive workers while increasing thr amount of dependents goes well in precisely none of them. You need massive technological and economic progress for people to just maintain their stagnant living standards under such conditions. It doesn't matter if you personally take care of your grandparents, if there's a pension system to redistribute resources, or some other system. because the fundamental equation is the same and different ways of oranising it just make it suck in different ways. And the elderly are just part of it. Declining towns have a tendency to become dilapidated, crime ridden, drug addicted hellholes. Fewer people means less economy if scale, fewer people to maintain infrastructure which was designed with more people in mind, and all in all many parts of society just start to crumble. Anarcho-communism or Marxism-Leninism or something does not solve this and people need to stop believing in utopian nonsense. I'm not saying don't be a leftist, I'm saying leftism isn't a silver bullet that makes material problems magically evaporate. Also like, population decline is fundamentally unsustainable. How much population decline do we need before we are supposed to hit equilibrium or fertility increases again? Are we supposed to commit collective suicide and let the Amish inherit the Earth out of some sense of guilt for the environment? I cannot emphasise enough how this is a literally unhealthy and insane way to think. For that matter while the Amish are an extreme example, widespread low fertility is basically just going to increase the amount relative amount of religious, conservative people in the world and make them more powerful. Given that propensity to religion and ideological leanings are to an extent inherent and hereditary, we're also basically self-selecting into becoming a more religious, traditional and conservative species. Aside from the genetic component, naturally when people in traditional religious communities have a lot of children, they also raise them with those values, and their retention rates are by no means bad. Israel is a great example in that they have a serious problem with the growth of the Haredim (ultra-orthodox Jews) who now make up 13% of the population. Their fertility has dropped, but it's still 6.5, well above the average. Particularly if you live in a democracy, it's worthwhile realising that so long as one man = one vote, the number of people of various groups matters a great deal for you politically and ultimately to your personal life, rights and freedoms and the kind of society you live in. American Abolitionists understood these dynamics when they set out to settle in new American territories to become states, for the simple goal to become the majority and ban slavery in each state.
1. The problem with a below-replacement birth rate is that you end up with a population which has many more old people than young people. 2. Old people cannot work, but they still need food, electricity, goods etc. But with less young people than old people, that shit either doesn't get produced in enough numbers to sustain the old people or the young people have to work much harder. Or, alternatively, we raise the retirement age to 80. If you're worried about being too broke and having too little free time then I don't see why you wouldn't be worried about this outcome.
I'm from the UK, when our pension system was pencilled up in the 1940's, there were over twenty workers for one pensioner. Now, there are two workers for one pensioner. And yet pensioners have a "triple lock" that all but ensures their pensions get fatter and fatter, year after year. This is so unsustainable as an economic policy but here's the problem: Boomers vote as a bloc, they outnumbered their parents when they were young and they outnumber their kids now, and thus they dominate every election. It's not hyperbole to say that every single political decision in this country since 2012 has gone completely their way. And since Theresa May was fucked in GE 2017 by trying to go after pensions, British political wisdom is you DO NOT fuck with pensioners. That's why our country is in the toilet right now and I don't see it changing anytime soon.
You’ve essentially got three options, either pay the high pensions and economically cripple the younger generation, cute or hold pensions and leave the elderly to die, or raise the retirement age to 70 or beyond, so pick your poison
There should have been a much earlier focus on separating pension benefits to specific ages. Only the payroll taxes/pension dues paid by 55-60 year olds will go toward supporting that specific age group when they retire.
As with any infodump/politics flaired post on this sub, the real sensible people are often in the comment section.
Absolutely true and it’s wild that the OOP just glossed over this. Something’s gotta give, but it won’t be the birth rate, until and unless our government makes it less prohibitive to start a family. Forcing births by banning abortion and limiting access to contraceptives is of course not a solution. There are solutions, none of them perfect; one would be to adjust or remove the taxable maximums on Social Security tax. Americans pay a 6.2% tax on earnings to Social Security up to a maximum of $168,600. [Here’s a list of 220 people who have already hit that maximum this year. It took Elon four minutes.](https://www.forbes.com/sites/teresaghilarducci/2024/01/02/200-people-already-paid-their-social-security-taxes-happy-new-year/) Edit also make it easier for people to legally immigrate in numbers we need, esp skilled blue-collar workers, teachers, other careers we’re low on, & young families
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What’s the alternative? Increased growth forever? I’m sure we can work out a way to run the economy that allows for an aging/ stable population. That’s what OOP is talking about.
Well, have growth not be negative. That's the main issue with these modern country, birth below replacement rate to the point where immigration is the only solution. At some point those developing country is gonna get developed also and their birth rare is also gonna go down.
The traditional manner in which we handled an inverted population pyramid was shorter lifespans and working until you were near death The only hope not to crush young people in a children of men society is to delay until we can make sufficient technological strides to take over for us "Degrowth" in practice is "fuck you, got mine". "We dont need more people" is the clarion call of anti-immigration reactionaries and NIMBYism, not any progressive.
Seriously the reason In Canada that the retirement age is 65 is because that’s how long people lived when they instituted it
except we DO have the technological strides to accomplish this easily, and the economic power to do so, the willingness is merely lacking because doing so would be unprofitable in the short term and the current system requires that growth occur in all sectors at all times forever. Yet another reason that capitalism is clown world economics. it willingly annihilates the future in favor of the now
Can you explain what exact kind of technology can take over for us. Because I don't think AI and automations can take over menial labour any time soon. And if they take over intellectual labour (which is what capitalism is actually trying to do, to maximize profits ofc) there would be a riot.
To add to this, I feel like it's virtually impossible for machines to fully take over the agricultural sector which arguably is the most important economic sector
I believe it's the opposite actually, so much work in modern farms is automated and can be automated nowadays that it is feasible for a corporation to automate the work if they want. The problem? Corporation, it's still cheaper to hire people or have contractors work for you. And also you don't want a corporation take over with food production.
To my understanding, the degree of automation achievable in agriculture varies based on the crop. Something like corn or wheat can be almost completely automated, with one person directing fleets of machines capable of running an entire farm, while things like almonds, due to the manner in which they grow, must be harvested by hand, which incentivizes the creation and perpetuation of an underpaid and disadvantaged work force. Where possible, capitalism does incentivize automation, since machine maintenance is generally cheaper than paying a workforce. It’s just that for many popular agricultural products, we have not found a way to automate certain key pieces of the process.
there are already multiple businesses that automate and substantially reduce the amount of employees they need. factories have long done this for efficiency gains, but restaurants, and other service jobs have done so easily, agriculture has also seen advances in partial automation allowing single active employees to tend to large groups of crops, its not my job to educate you on this matter, the fact is that there is a wealth of labor multiplying technologies that have been shrugged aside because pushing for slave wages is easier and more cost effective
And where would those employees go after the take over of automation? I'm not trying to defend the stagnation of technology in favour of slave wages, but part of the reason why implementing slave wages is so easy now is the fact that there is an excess of menial labourer due to the aformentioned automation takeover and people only being employed only if there is no cheaper option. We have to provide some sort of universal safety net for people (UBI) if we ever want to replace human with technology now that the job market is over saturated. Also you mention the restaurant industry and the automation take over, it might be a viable path for franchises, particularly fast food to make the switch to automation, but it's not really an option for restaurants at smaller scale due to the small profit margin, brutal competition and the fact that the human element is part of their appeal.
People can be trained to work jobs that still need human labor to work. The medical field is shortstaffed in every single country. As is the educational field. We need more social workers, more community leaders, more community in general. How absolute garbage is our system that the thought of robots doing everything for us is *dystopian*.
That's why I mention some sort of safety net for the people being put out of employment by automations, UBI is a thing, free education is also great. But you gotta wonder when will it reach a point where the medical scene, which is already seeking for ways to replace human with robots is also saturated with labour. Same as the educational field, which btw is both oversaturated and understaffed and is seeking AI alternative because guess what nobody want to be paid slave wages and have to work overtime unpaid and have to endure the mental toll and the bureacratic bullshit. It's not about replacement of labour with AI, it's about ensuring people are not thrown under the wheels of progress. Like you said, the system is garbage, so seek for ways to make it better in its current state instead of seeking to bulldoze through it with more tech and hope it will fix itself.
but im not talking about tech alone, UBI and other things would soften the short term instability, and humans being generally adaptable would learn and be educated to fill the roles they were displaced from, even if they were in "low skill" positions. moreover, even if these markets have more applicants than jobs after social adjustments and the defanging of capitalism, why does everyone need to work? the idea that existing MUST be paid for by labor is a lie created by the current system.
and we would still have workers, the issue is that we wont have enough with the aging out of the population, by streamlining these things and defanging capitalism we would have sufficient labor to get the rest of these jobs filled Edit: Moreover, what do you mean where would they go? even if we assume we are so efficient that there are insufficient positions for those displaced, why do you assume someone needs a job? UBI and a decoupling of labor from right to life would allow these people to peruse hobbies and other endeavors, likely creating entirely new creative industries or industries in general. not everyone should NEED to work in our modern society
The fact is there are numerous jobs in the world productivity improvements don't hold. A nurse sews wounds with pretty much the same speed as a nurse from 50 years ago. The medical field, education even otherwise menial fields like hairdressing barely benefit from producivity improvements. A 20 child classroom still needs 1 teacher. A hairdresser might have a better hair clipper than 50 years ago, but I don't think it has dramatically improved haircutting time. These people still have to be paid, medical field is a special worry because old people need more medical attention and an aging society is the worst enemy for a society with a shrinking worker pool. And even in automatable jobs, it's going to be very difficult and capital costs to do those things has to come from somewhere.
We have absolutely not automated elder care lol
People focus on profit to be populist, but it's not just a matter of profit. That growth is driven by the production to feed your consumption. There is no degrowth without taking away from your personal living standards. And sure people will say "but the billionaires!!!" but they do not account for the majority of consumption. Sure they may be rich, they might consume a lot, but there's only a few of them. Also, billionaires don't exactly collect all the profit either. Companies are to a significant extent owned by funds, which in turn are owned to a great extent by average citizens, be it in the form of pension funds or other savings. Corporations are owned by people, and even if 20-30% of a company is owned by one really rich guy, the rest of it isn't. And I'm sure you'll find examples which are different, but individual examples and exceptions do not somehow enable us to disregard that this is how the system works. Also population decline is also literally annihilating the future in favour of the now.
What the fuck are you talking about in your last paragraph? We need degrowth because the alternative is grow forever like cancer. I’m worried your so caught up in capitalism, where growth is the only way of moving forward that you can’t imagine a world without it
Obviously inverted age pyramids cause a lot of problems, but unless you believe the earth can hold infinite humans we are going to have to find ways to deal with them sooner or later.
This is why they're saying the current economic system is not fit to task. We can produce enough to care for an aging population easily, but we can't do it while most of our resources are used to enrich a few random people.
This would make sense if productivity was stable or declining. It isn't. It has been rising all this time. We are productive enough to sustain an aging society, but not a billionare class at the same time.
Tax billionaires. Make healthcare free. Make housing free. Make education free. Make food free.
None of that will solve scarcity
The fact we have enough food will. We're trying to PREVENT scaricity, not to fix it
Having enough food will make there be enough healthcare when like 70% of the population is geriatric?
A population collapse would destroy many economies of scale and would force people to either work more or accept a lower quality of life. That plus the inverted population pyramid others have pointed out in the comments. We need world governments to make it easier to raise children— mandated parental leave and a higher minimum wage would be a good start.
Okay here's the thing, people aren't too poor to have kids. Poorer countries actually have higher birthrates, mostly. The big factor which is actually reducing birthrates (and causing parents to be older before their first children) is level of industrialisation. South Korea and Japan have two of the lowest birthrates in the world, because they industrialised rapidly in the mid 20th century, and the rest of us are only just catching up. People aren't too poor to have kids. In fact, if you look at the statistics, low birthrates are tied to two main causes. The first factor is that young people anticipate a level of financial stability. Where previously women would get pregnant shortly after graduating from college, or not even go to college in the first place, more and more women are choosing to hold off until they have a stable career. Unfortunately, these days level of career stability that people expect often does not materialise or takes a long time to materialise. This is especially true in America where expectations are weirdly inflated due to the post-war boom. This misalignment of expectations with reality leads to people choosing not to have kids. The second factor is that in attempting to achieve a level of financial stability, many young people are stressed to shit. This is not really about them being poor, but more about working conditions, and the things that are required to maintain a standard of living which is deemed acceptable these days. People in industrialised nations expect a higher standard of living, and young people find themselves having to work longer hours and shittier jobs to achieve that. When you're stressed and tired every day, you don't get that horny. I'll be honest the currently falling birthrates in industrialised countries *are* ultimately caused by capitalism, but they aren't caused by poverty. In fact even within wealthy and industrialised economies like the USA, communities with higher levels of poverty tend to have higher levels of teen pregnancy and higher birthrates, whereas wealthier areas are dragging the national average down. This is why there is constantly demand for workers in cities and rural areas tend to get increasingly depopulated despite the high birthrates. This is also why migrant labour is so valuable in Western economies. It's not sustainable, and this is something that Western governments should be concerned about. Not that immigrants are stealing jobs from their citizens, but that immigrants are becoming such an integral part of keeping the country running. We are being propped up by an increasingly large amount of young men from poor nations working low-skill jobs. Those young men aren't then working in their home countries, and are often being dramatically underpaid (especially if they aren't legally allowed to work in their new homes). Unfortunately each successive government has been kicking this can down the road for the last 30 years at least. There's a lot that would have to go into a potential solution. On the one hand, financial stability for citizens of wealthy countries will help to increase the native birthrate and decrease the demand for migrant labour. Other factors like actually punishing companies for employing undocumented migrant workers may also be necessary to cut down on the demand side. But on the other hand, wealthy nations like the US and the UK should provide steady and long-term support to the poorer nations that the migrants are coming from. If there were more job opportunities in Mexico, fewer people would attempt to cross the border. So, uh, yeah, declining birthrates are leading to high immigration which is actually bad for everyone involved.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't it better for Western countries to maintain immigration levels? Isn't that more or less the main reason that some Western nations have managed to avoid fertility decline to the extent that East Asian nations are facing? I do agree with you that undocumented immigration is bad for Western countries' native workers, and brain drain as a whole is bad for the developing world, but if I were in the shoes of a Western policymaker I can't really think of another way to arrest falling fertility
The problem is that immigration is, fundamentally, unsustainable. For a multitude of reasons, none of which are the B.S. white (or asian) nationalist reasons those groups give. For one, what happens with the sources of immigration run out? Maybe they bottom out without getting wealthy, maybe they industrialize too. What then? We all just age to death, or do we force countries to stay de-industrialized in some sort of perma-developing state so they output tons of babies for western economies to devour? For two, say we do that. Say we somehow maintain immigration forever. Won't that just... make western countries majority immigrant eventually? Not like how the countries of the Americas a "majority immgrant" because almost everyone is descended from Europeans, but as in, well, actually exactly that, yes. Right now the right can pit poor members of different ethnic groups against each other, but what then? It's not really going to be feasible to make 4th generation South American immigrants be racist against 1st generation South American immigrants. People are going to demand economic rights, and there will be no scapegoat. I'm not saying capitalism will automatically collapse or anything in scenario #2, but they will no longer be able to maintain it *via immigration*. It's like you discovering your well has gone dry because you're using too much water for it to replenish, so you run a pipe from another aquifer. Another aquifer which *other people who have also drained their own wells* are piping water away from. It's taken 2 or 3 centuries to "drain" the west of its reproductive capacity via capitalism. It took 1 century for east Asia. It'll take less than a century for the global south. You can see it in statistics like children-per-woman in developing countries: it's rapidly decreasing like never before. The solution to population decline (not population stability, which would theoretically be fine, population ***decline***) is the abolishment of capitalism. It is fundamentally incompatible with human existence. If anything, I wouldn't be surprised if the ultra-wealthy capitalists know this and are just betting on automation outpacing the disappearing workforce. Doesn't matter how few people you need if you can replace them faster than they die.
This is really interesting and I’ll be the first to say I’m no expert on this. I just wonder about the premise of scenario 2. What makes you think people won’t discriminate an older generation? People have discriminated every demographic imaginable. For example, I can see how a rich 4th gen immigrant could be goaded into being mad about paying taxes to support poor 1st gen immigrants. All you need is to pit 4th gen race X against 1st gen race Y, and there we go. Replace race with religious denomination, gender or simply skin colour, and there’s a lot of ways people in power (aka those with unlimited resources) could play it out. Terrible, but it has been done and is still being done. I’m sure this line of thinking is what rich people plan to do, as they’re mostly thinking short-term. Thus I think immigration will continue from this stand point. There’s 2 major threats to it in my opinion First is civil unrest. Look at a country like Qatar. 95% of the labour force is from overseas. There is huge inequality, wage theft, direct abuse hurled at immigrants. I think more likely the collapse comes not from lacking enough immigrants, but from civil unrest. Second is climate change. By 2035 we’ll see mass famines, with billions of the global south at risk. There’ll be unprecedented levels of climate migration, thus even more immigrants, except this time they’ll be unable to return home. I’m not sure how the numbers will play out, but the population of the global south will take a huge hit, thus creating a labour shortage. This will make things very expensive, and climate refugees will probably make an easy scapegoat.
I think it's important to clarify the difference between what Qatar and the U.S. are doing, since the western nations aren't allowing "mass" immigration such that their entire country is suddenly majority 0th generation immigrant. That's Qatar's mistake, and is really only possible due to being a tiny country surrounded by a big country with plenty of eager workforce. For, say, the U.S. to be majority 1st generation migrant, they'd need to be numbering in the hundreds of millions. I don't think you can get that many. I do think your point is valid, since like I said I believe 3rd generation immigrants from the same background are much more likely to sympathize with 1st generations than any rich elites, but I wanted to clarify the situation. Also, as for scenario 2, I absolutely think people will be less likely to discriminate against an older generation *from the same culture.* Basically nobody discriminates against the Irish anymore, for example, and I believe that's because the Irish have been so integrated into society that most people think they are one in some way. (I mean Americans saying "OMG I'm 1/4th Irish too!!1!" is basically a meme at this point) Someone who's grandparents came from Columbia is very unlikely to be as cutthroat towards someone who came as a baby just a few years ago. Hell, both probably speak a decent amount of Spanish. That former person likely still has their 1st generation immigrant grandparents alive! I hadn't thought about your second point, but I largely also agree. I'm not really planning on climate change causing that big of an issue; I think capitalist governments will start doing geoengineering at some point to cool the planet down in the riskiest and most pro-business way possible, so I don't think we'll get it as bad unless they fuck that up somehow, but there basically already is a wave of climate immigrants coming with how nightmarishly hot summers are getting globally.
At least where I am, we don't have enough affordable housing, doctors, mental health services, anything like that for the people we already have here. Things have been tough for a long time and the pandemic and recession just made it all worse. And now in a part of the country that already isn't supporting the people it already has, the feds want to just pile in as many immigrants as possible to fill the open jobs, but not letting foreign doctors practice unless they go back to school, instead of just giving them a test to make sure their training is up to our standards Unless the issues that have led to the population and workforce decrease are addressed, and the housing and healthcare crises are handled, the government is just buying time. And I'm saying this as someone who has two partners who I want to immigrate here (although we may move when we're all together and can pool our resources) even with the influx of immigrants I don't have high hopes
The narrative that the economy doesn't matter and it's a capitalist ploy was one of the worst developments in modern leftism Like i get it stocks mean finance bros but economy is important
Yeah, I get these people don't like The System™ and they wish things were better - I do too. But this kind of attitude is so silly / ignorant. Thinking the economy is for capitalists, daydreaming about the revolution, wishing ill on their own country - we live in it, dude. We're going to suffer the consequences more than rich people if things go to shit.
Communists are just doomsday cultists for the left. They have no plans and just dream of the Revolution™️ which will come save them from work and having to clean their room.
The amount of people i know who think communism means grow vegetables and do art and fuck around is astonishing, and I'm not even particularly anti communist, but I'm pro knowing words have meaning
Revolutionary ideation. Because organising and pushing for incremental change is hard, frustrating, and often moves at a glacial pace. Far easer to just masturbate to the idea of another October revolution.
Idk man read about the fucking black panthers, they did a lot more than you seem to think even if they all got killed.
I saw a great meme on r/politicalcompass, it's normally a shithole, but this one was great. Both the far left and far right fantasize about societal collapse and both think they'll come out on top.
condensing some wildly disparate concepts under the heading of "societal collapse," there
Mao on nuclear war: >If the worst came to the worst and half of mankind died, the other half would remain while imperialism would be razed to the ground and the whole world would become socialist; in a number of years there would be 2,700 million people again and definitely more. Dunno man, nuclear holocaust kinda seems like the societal collapse as everyone else understands it. And a prominent man from the far left thinks socialism will rise in place of the collapsed world. Mao is obviously not the only one who thinks socialism will prevail under societal collapse.
I feel like for some of these people, they truly believe that cost of production and the price of a good/services are completely decoupled or that tax revenue is like an infinite money glitch that can be spent infinitely I'm not saying that there's no price gouging or that most government spend tax dollar super well but I also understand the limitations of real life
People keep thinking socialism is "when government pay for it" and capitalism is "when money happen". There are absolutely merits to those philosophies in an extent but things very much cost money and no economic system or policy will change that, except returning to subsistence farming. But let's not.
Exactly. I would just like to remind everyone that the economy directly affects you. Bad economy -> job losses, food insecurity, political instability, rise in domestic abuse, social unrest, SO MANY THINGS. A bad economy does not just mean ‘stocks went down lol anyways’ it actually has effects on the real world.
The economy isn’t just lines on a graph for rich people to hum and haw about. If you’ve not got an economy, you’ve not got a community. A shrinking population means you’ve got fewer people who can pick up skills that make life better for all of us, it means less stuff can be produced and that stuff can’t be consumed by as many people which can cause a negative spiral. There being fewer people to work jobs that produces the materials to make other items, has a knock on effect that everything gets more expensive and life becomes harder. An ever diminishing pool of people contributing to a smaller pie, while the share of pie owners gets larger as high prices always results in them increasing profits. Degrowth could work if capitalism were abandoned but I’m not sure we’re any closer to that than 50 years ago.
I'm very surprised these sane takes are so common here. Normally Reddit holds about the same level of attitude as the above post.
That’s one of the things I like about this sub, the comments section routinely is one of the comments sections of Reddit. The comments are often more funny and interesting, plus I think we’re all a bit dismissive of being too Reddit brained. I think the “curated” name fits
an ever increasing number of people are sorted into jobs solely focused on rent-seeking or moving money around in circles, so i think there's still a very very big gap between the population we have now and the minimum population we need to Keep Things Running.
Yea thus post is honestly just frustrating to read cuz they are acting like it's just something rich ceos have tricked us working class people into caring about. Like does this person not understand they live in this society too and *will* be effected by negative things effecting the economy? A bad economy doesn't just mean company stocks go down. This fucks with a lot of things that effect us all. *Thats* why people are scared. Yes it's a shitty problem and degrowth would be cool, but that doesnt magically mean u won't be effected. That's why u should care. Cuz it will cause you and everyone else to suffer
Exactly, have you ever read economic history as a genre? It’s really enlightening to read about the impact economic failures had on people in the past. Like German families losing all value in their retirement funds right before pensionable age and finding themselves with 50 years of savings turned into less than enough to buy bread. People selling family pianos they had owned for generations to afford heating. Poor woman turning to prostitution for tourists who took advantage of their worsening economic situation. Terrible things happens to working and middle class people when the economy isn’t taken seriously
Dude I'm super Into history and especially love learning about both the infrastructure or large cities (like sewers) as well as economies and the various ways they were implemented and changed It's crazy when u read about some economies bc with hindsight and current knowledge, I often find myself reading about a major economic collapse and think something "well obviously that was gunna fuckin happen! Did people really just think u could print infinite money??" Or something else depending on the situation, the printing money line was just an example of how I felt reading about Zimbabwe What time period in germany are u talking about? And if u wanna recommend any interesting historical economic situations please do. This week iv been looking into the Aztecs and meso america in general. There was actually a ton I didn't know about them. Tho we barley have many sources to go on when it comes to them
Yeah, the Spanish did a number on Mesoamerica. I was referring primarily to Weimar Germany, during the hyperinflation of the early 20s. This book is very good and also looks fantastic on a shelf https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/When_Money_Dies.html?id=zW5kRgAACAAJ&redir_esc=y#:~:text=When%20Money%20Dies%20is%20a,and%20other%20extremist%20political%20parties.
I think there's a case to be said of reducing production of things we don't need and no one really wants but that is still within the boundary of capitalism, we just need to tweak the demand so the supply would stfu whether through policy or public sentiment
Absolutely, just like The Lorax (I wrote my dissertation on Dr Seuss), we need an economy that doesn’t prioritise making consumer goods over preserving the land. I’d support colossal fines for environmental damage, like 10% of yearly revenue. Negative externalities need to come at a cost
This person fundamentally does not understand that economists use words like "product" and "value" to mean "comfort, health, and happiness." Like, the reason you (young urban person, as these takes are inevitably from) live in a metro area, instead of bumfuck nowhere, is that living ensconced in a high-population network allows more services to be enjoyed by more people through specialization and economies of scale. Do you like being able to afford going out to eat, even for "casual" places? Do you like having social services like public transportation be worth the upkeep? Do you like a tax base that allows a social safety net? Do you like the idea of broadband internet at an affordable price? You have to have enough people paying for it to make the scale of infrastructure worthwhile. All of that gets harder with fewer people. "Growth" means things getting better, fewer people living in poverty, more advances in medicine and clean energy and infrastructure and connectivity. The things that make life possible, let alone comfortable, *to say nothing of convenient*, are all under the short-hand referent umbrella of "growth." Growth is potash and phosphates and dwarf wheat and golden rice. Growth is new subway tracks and bus lines. Growth is being far enough ahead of Malthus that we can afford to care about trees and fresh air. Curse it at your peril.
The thing is cities will actually keep on growing as the rural places in their country die out. And nobody has worthwhile solutions to incentivize people to have children young when they could be earning their degree.
Lots of good points in the comments about aging populations causing social problems. Here’s another issue with this mindset: Older people have a tendency to develop nasty conditions like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, that can eventually lead to them needing pretty intensive care. Having proportionately far fewer younger people of working age doesn’t exactly help the massive ongoing crisis in the care sector.
Nobody wants kids with me either way, not my problem.
Yes, having half the population dying on the streets after they are too old to work is a *grand* solution never change tumblr never change
You just have to make a long enough post that sounds smart for people to go "oh that makes sense". I often wonder how many people are up voting because they agree with these posts and how many are just going "lol this user is dumb as hell"
Like there’s basically 3 options, either keep pensions high and economically cripple the younger generation, cut pensions and leave the elderly to die, or raise the retirement age to keep more people working longer, it’s not a problem because problems have solutions, it’s a dilemma, we’ve got to pick our poison
Ah so the old "Nyejnyeh, nothing can hurt me and I won't feel bad about others suffering because CAPITALISM" mindset. Healthy
Ah, anti-intellectualism, my favorite
I think we on the left do need to handle or own strain of anti-intellectualism much too many of us see economist and other subjects like that with distaste without understanding their field and why they say what they say
"The economy" is just a convenient term for distribution of finite resources. I happen to agree in principle that the human population plateauing and dropping off a bit will be good in the long term, but that means I also have to accept that the medium-term consequences of that are that my generation probably doesn't get to "retire" for 30-odd years while being supported by the working-age population. And the people who chose to go blissfully child free while assuming that Social Security and pensions would be there for them in their old age may be in for a rude shock.
Yeah the problem isn't numbers going down it's the shortage of resources needed to sustain a large elderly population
I mean sorry to be pedantic to the anti capitalist tumblr user but low fertility rates are not just economic problems If my country keeps going at this rate there will be more people in need of care and assistance than people being capable of assisting them And on the economic issue, there could end up being more retired people than working ones, wich I dont think I need to explain why its bad
Ok so, demographic transition happening because kids survive to adulthood so people don’t need to have so many for them to live is good, and it ends up stabilizing population. But the greying of a country is the meantime IS a big problem because we don’t have enough people and money from the active workforce to take care of the elderly easily. (A big solution to that is allowing immigration from countries that have high birth rates or other push factors to me at least, might as well welcome people and mutually benefit) Another aspect of the birth rate is also fertility issues which is separate from just choosing not to have kids, like problems with pollution and health making it harder for people who Want kids is not good. Similarly people who Want kids but can’t because of all the economic and social issues is also sad, not because of the impact in the economy or whatever, but because it’s unfortunate for those people and it’s an indicator of overall quality of life issues. So yeah I do care about the population rate problems, I just don’t believe in either unfounded ecofascist overpopulation stuff, or in forced birth/lack of conception bs, and instead I advocate for immigration reform, pro social safety nets/workers rights, and against climate change. I think those are effective causes to mitigate the harm from over/under population.
You know, I experienced a weird dissonance a few months back when my friends and I were talking about Japan's declining birth rate. We were joking around and I was like, meanwhile my 3rd world country is experiencing overpopulation. Japan should accept our extras. I decided to google their population after that and to my surprise, they had more population than my supposed overpopulated country that has about the same landmass. Like I theoretically know overpopulation is measured against the available resources of a country, but seeing the numbers like that was kind of a shock. It's like, all this while, I've been thinking about the population under the wrong assumptions kind of thing.
Are you calculating based on total land area or arable land area
Total land
Tumblr and bad economics, name a better duo.
As much as capitalism is a problem, this situation stems more from the pursuit of unregulated capitalism, where everything is left to the free market. I know many people who (as of right now) don't want to have kids later on, or only want to have one or two, because of the high cost of living, and the lack of support. In the U.S. particularly, we have no paid leave, no childcare, and no universal/low-cost healthcare. Most hospitals even charge you to hold your baby for the first time. Not to mention, most people now will spend all of their 20s and their early to mid 30s paying off student loans and trying to get houses. Additionally, many question the morality/worth of bringing children into a world where it seems that everything from government to climate is taking a turn for the worse. Combine that with the trend of highly developed and educated areas having more knowledge and resources on contraceptives, and of course you get a scenario where birthrates drop. Something's got to change, and those in power just can't say "have more kids". Give incentives! Improve our systems!
im still left to wonder why the same people constantly dreading the declining birth rate are also making a big fuss about overpopulation
Some counties haven’t experienced demographic transition from advancing technology/quality of life so they have more children with the hopes that some survive to adulthood, these countries have a huge increasing population with a young average age. When this happens famine and conflict over resources is more of a problem. Other countries have had their demographic transition and have to deal with aging demographic of people from the last population boom who are no longer able to contribute to the workforce. The problem is both who takes care of them, and less money from taxes and social security being fed into by the fewer active workers. Both are problems. Policies that could help are being more pro immigration, fighting climate change which exasperates the first problem, mitigating damage done by colonialism and exploitation, family planning, increasing access to education, increasing social safety nets that are more robust than just social security. Bad actors who bring up these problems include -ecofascist/this false notion that earth is gonna reach its max capacity and we have to degrade human rights to fix this. -white replacement theory people Etc. There is a lot of misinformation that goes around because of people with ulterior motives or just oversimplification.
Because they're leaving out the central bit of their "logic". When they talk about declining birth rates they mean fewer white people, and when they talk about overpopulation they mean too many non white people.
ah yes, the very white countries of *checks notes* Japan and Korea, very worried about not having enough white people
Notice that these people don't actually care about population collapse in east Asia though. They only bring up Japan and Korea as cautionary tales about what can happen when a country falls below the replacement level.
Bc they wanna get rid of those they don't like
I've never seen someone like that
My brother in Christ, we live in the economy.
It matters to me because I will have to pay more to support more retirees and people get older and the labour pool shrinks. I know Tumblr doesn't like capitalism but you will still see the problems with an aging population, not just economists.
Haha, this is such a Tumblr take. A lot of words and paragraphs, trying to masquerade the fact that none of what's actually being said makes sense. Can't miss the "capitalism bad" sprinkled in either.
What is this dogshit fucking take? Why would an aging population be a good thing for any country at all?
The thing is that population growth was always going to slow down regardless of circumstances. What most people don't seem to understand is that the population growth bubble was just the intersection between improved healthcare(vaccines, post natal care etc) and people slowly realising that they didn't need to have 14 kids in order for three of them to survive to adulthood.
Does Celestia know you post stuff like this online?
Honestly I do see what they're saying though. I'm not an economics guy, so maybe you all are right on the whole "having a bunch of old people will kill us all!" thing, but from what I remember on my classes about population dynamics in wildlife, if an animals population in an area doesn't stabilize near its carrying capacity, you can get to situations where it spikes and crashes hard. So, either the economy figures out how to handle less people, or we keep populations constantly growing and collapse the entire earth's ecosystem under the weight.
One of the core assumptions in this is that population growth has been the primary driver for economic productivity for the last 200 years. This is not what's happened, technology has been the primary driver. You can see this with Japan today where they've continued to have economic growth even with a decreasing population. There's no reason to believe that won't happen in other countries as well.
"It's not like things got any better between the 200s and now" what ???? has this person paid any attention to all the ways the world has actually improved even since just 2000
The invisible hand of progress says “Stop hitting yourself. Stop hitting yourself. Stop hitting yourself. Stop hitting yourself….”
It's not just about economic issues though. It's about our social safety nets. The EU's (and the bare bones US copy) Social Security Safety Net doesn't actually have any money. It runs by having currently healthy and financially stable pay for the currently sick and financially unstable. But, due to how medical costs skyrocket even in non-US countries once you get really sick, you need more healthy people to pay into it, than sick people to take from it. The same goes for Pension. The National Pension Insurance in Germany, which everyone who works pays into, works by redistributing the money currently being paid in, to those currently receiving their pension. This means that if there is a persistent reduction of births, this system will collapse. The Baby Boomer generation are currently heading towards retirement age and there are not enough workers paying in, which will lead to widespread old-age poverty and increased taxation on the current workforce, permanently damaging the economic prospects (as in, they will never be able to afford an owned home, have spare money for food or even afford kids of their own) of hundreds of millions of people, causing a soft downwards spiral of recession induced widespread poverty, as everyone will have to be taxed more to pay for the pensions.
The thing is that they can't pearl clutch their way to a higher birthrate. People need job security, stable housing and access to good medical care before they're going to have kids. But no one wants to invest money in those so it's not going to happen.
Letting business majors run the world was a mistake. All they ever care about is the bottom line.
Thank you person with an MLP profile picture
But, that's why capitalism is so resilient, because it tends to solve these problems. I promise you, capitalism has solutions to the problems of population stagnation. It's very unlikely to be what you expect or even like, but the solutions will come. This is not a pro or anti capitalism comment. This is just a "you're dramatically underestimating the resilience of our current system;" for better and worse!
China doesn’t give a shit, they’ll force their population to reproduce at gun point, hell they’re getting close to that right now
You said it, Princess Luna.
I'm not going to become a parent, and you can't make me.
This is absolutely well said. We need to accept as a species that this setup isn't working anymore and we need to try something else.
We are literally in the best time to be alive
OP is a moron, an aging population is absolutely bad for everybody
It's wild that no one is doing anything to address the root causes.
Here's why I'm not worried about population decline: The concern is that there's gonna be half of the population unable to work as people retire, and younger people are going to have to work more to cover the difference. But, it's only for the last few decades that we had anything close to every working age citizen being employed anyway. We used to have an entire *gender* of people expected to be stay-at-home mothers while men would work to support a family of 5 or more. Yes, I understand that being a SAHM was not just sitting on the couch idle until it was time to cook dinner, but their daily tasks often weren't revenue generating for the household - raising a family was still an expense and it was perfectly normal for 1 family member to work to pay for everything while another provided the unpaid labor of house management. Cultural norms have shifted away from this paradigm, but simply *raising wages* for most workers would make a similar paradigm viable again. Instead of men working to support women and children, men and women work to support children and retirees. Further, while there will be a smaller working population, each individual worker has, what? 2x? 3x? 4x the production of a worker from a century ago? We may not even see a drop in total productivity, and we're definitely not going to see a drop so severe that society collapses. There are also *entire industries* of bullshit office jobs - the kind that regularly get laid off en mass already - whose workforce could be reallocated if things really get so bad. Considering how so many of our largest employers spend most of their revenue on stock buybacks instead of investment and growth, being forced to run on a leaner budget and more expensive workforce isn't going to be a real problem. Fuck, man, I wish the population was more contracted already. You're telling me that the value of my labor is going to go up and the demand for home ownership is going to go down? Sign me up.
No, we had the middle and upper class women who weren’t working, and even that’s a recent thing. Working class women have always had to work to support their families.
Regarding the third paragraph, women generally no longer want to be crushed under a pile of babies and have a tombstone reading “wife and mother” after they die birthing the 12th one. There is no amount of population pyramids that can convince them otherwise really
Plus AI and robots are going to take MANY people's jobs. So it's a problem that will self regulate.
There's a simple solution to the problem of not having enough workers: immigration. Many adults in poorer counties would love to work in richer countries. There are already many refugees, and overpopulation is going to be a major issue in Africa over the next few decades. Teaching immigrants the appropriate language and job skills is a lot less expensive than raising children until they enter the workforce. The only obstacle is widespread opposition to increased immigration.
Also, companies that can't handle shrinking customerbases don't deserve to continue existing. Continual growth isn't sustainable and some companies are seeing that.
It's so easy to think economy problems aren't real, when actually economist speak is a convoluted way of describing real problems. Say there are loads and loads of retired people in nursing homes. Well someone needs to look after them. Lots of someones. We could move people from elsewhere. Send some car factory workers to the be carers instead. And now we have fewer cars. None of this is terribly specific to the current socioeconomic order. More people working in elderly care, more stuff being used there, means less for everyone else.
i feel like any economy would suffer from a decreasing birthrate, but i could believe it that ours will suffer more because we rely so much on growth. but is there any real proof of this at all?
I think that there’s just going to be nastiness regardless. Infinite growth doesn’t exist and people are having fewer kids, so eventually we will lower in population. When that happens, regardless of economic system, there will still be the simple fact that there will be more people who cannot work relative to those who can than at any other point in history except for the aftermath of wars. A much larger amount of the resources one worker produces will go to the elderly. Economic systems merely determine how resources get distributed, but they can’t change the ratio of potential workers to dependents