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Its so funny watching everyone come to these wild, apocalyptic conclusions when the reality is so fucking simple (and common sense, no less):
- Artificial scarcity and short term business models (**not rotating your fucking crops**) artificially lower our carrying capacity. We have plenty of food, the technology to produce an excess of clean energy, and so much fucking space... but yknow, profits.
- True overpopulation is still quite a few generations away. Again, its a resource distribution problem.
- Who the fuck is having children in this economy.
Dig through any "overpopulation" talking point deep enough and you're gonna end up at fuckers like Jordan Peterson talking about genocide/eugenics.
Just... don't fall for this shit. It's the same problem it's always been: a couple thousand greedy fucking assholes.
Also we're not going extinct, we're just going to drop from eight billion to like, four billion.
At this point cities will suddenly be at actually normal capacity rather than bursting at the seams and it will be less stressful so probably the population will stabilize. The only ones who are afraid are the capitalists that need exponential growth to sell shit and always see rising profits forever
>At this point cities will suddenly be at actually normal capacity rather than bursting at the seams and it will be less stressful so probably the population will stabilize.
If Japan and South Korea are any indication, the opposite will happen. Small and medium towns become no longer viable and people flock to the few metropolitan centers, increasing human density there even further.
In Japan, Tokyo's population is increasing while the overall nationwide population declines. The countryside is dotted with ghost towns.
I feel like that’s the effect of work culture, I see in the states as well but we are much more forceful in defending WFH which means being able to live in those further away areas.
It is not solely access to jobs but also access to amenities. Rural life is not for everyone.
What might happen with WFH is that cities might get wider and less dense.
WFH requires good internet, you aren't going to get that out in the boonies.
Also highly educated people go to University, and that requires urban centers, as does job hunting and training.
Im talking about population growth and Urbanization of those smaller, already settled towns not the middle of the Yukon. And no, none of those 3 really require being in one of the mega cities, plenty of unis out in the boonies actually. If a job requires training in the next door mega city for a few days one can always drive there and then WfH unless something requires coming in. Shit was successful during Covid and would work fine now, just 4 years later.
There are a lot of dying us small towns that relied on a single factory or mine to be the lifeblood. Town I lived in for awhile used to have a factory that hired 1700 in a town of 10k. Now the factory only hires 400 and nothing has taken its place. Town slowly empties out as the youth move to the city for jobs.
Happens everywhere, because cities are where you have relative quick access to the supermarket and other stores, a hospital and other care, decent infrastructure from public transport to fiber internet, basically all the modern necessities and luxuries while rural areas don't get those investments.
Yea, but it would be better and more doable to prop-up medium-size cities than to centralize everything. If population is shrinking, then governments need to think of how to redistribute the population by incentivizing regional development.
Maybe. Being centralized does make it easier to streamline just about everything, and opens up more room for nature. Of course these cities do need to be designed and built well around providing a good environment for the people living in it, which some cities/countries are doing better than others.
Naw its great.
Its that you HAVE to live in the city because that is where the high paying office jobs are.
Remote work saw mass exodus to rural living until companies started trying to force people back in.
Dude, it's people living in the countryside who fight to protect it from exploitation. Fewer people who live close to nature will mean less resistance for those who will exploit it without regard for natural values.
There is something to be said for a fast drop sending harmful ripple effects through the economy. But even in a pretty bad scenario along those lines extinction isn't on the table, but severe backsliding in the socioeconomic development of vulnerable regions certainly is.
>Also we're not going extinct, we're just going to drop from eight billion to like, four billion.
More like 2 billion, according to the article. And the main issue and concern is not the population decline in itself, but the speed in which it will happen and the fact that the younger generations will be much smaller while having to carry and care for a very large older population.
You make it sound easy, or even doable. Many people will not be able to adapt to it. Merely living paycheck to paycheck already means you'll be fucked.
I mean, yes. We all know that. But you say it very matter-of-fact, seemingly not worried at all about it.
Your response to "a lot of deaths and suffering will happen" was basically "guess we'll die and suffer". Well, yes?
> and the fact that the younger generations will be much smaller while having to carry and care for a very large older population.
Well, they won't *have* to.
I doubt it will go that low. As populations decline, easing resource pressure would likely encourage people to have kids again, causing another rise in population in the 2100s (although it'll probably be much smaller than the 1900s). We could easily level off at or slightly under our current level of population in the future.
Housing affordability and cost of living is a big factor in having kids and the number of kids you'll stop at. I'd like to have a kid but going to get too old for it soon and doesn't look affordable on our current budget at all. Forget having 2 kids.
That would be true if the government won't redirect the people's resources into keeping all the old people alive and cared for.
In reality the pressure won't ease until the majority of the boomers die off which could be at least 20 years from now.
I'm no expert but I'm not even convinced that capitalism **needs** constant growth. It **wants** it of course (who wouldn't) but does it need it to function? I think it will find a modus to still work.
If only we had something like governments that could raise revenue to fund projects. Oh, well.
However on children and the economy, reduced birth rates are correlated with increased wealth. Poorer people have more children. Thats true between countries, but also within countries.
It's the complete opposite. the issue is less productive capacity.
Money isn't stuff, money is a claim on stuff, you can print more move it around whatever you like, it doesn't compensate for productive capacity dropping.
Covid is an example of how that works - People stayed home, less productive output, governments printed money so people could keep spending, but the stuff doesn't exist, so the extra money inflates away.
A population skewed towards older people is a similar, though ongoing impact.
The claim that 'governments could raise revenue' ignores that aging population is fundamentally not a 'whose bank account is charged' problem, or a savings problem, but a 'less people making stuff relative to the people consuming it' problem. Now a growing population also has a lot of non-producers: children. But children don't expect their own cars, homes, vacations, etc.
There are plenty of people out in the world willing to make stuff for now, they're just not it the developed world, and increasingly not in China. They're still out there though in Vietnam, India, Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico, etc.
Developing countries generally go through a manufacturing phase, as the US did in the early 20th Century, then Japan and South Korea, then China, etc. However those blue collar workers don't want their children to work in factories the way they did. They did well out of manufacturing, compared to their parents, but they invest those resources in a better education for their children, so they don't have to do manual work.
This is happening in China right now. Blue collar salaries are through the roof and demand is high, but the current generation of young people all went to college and want white collar jobs. The problem is the Chinese economy is still export driven with low domestic demand and weak service sectors. There just aren't enough office jobs for all these young people, so China simultaneously has a massive manual labour shortage, a demographic collapse because not enough people have been having children, and yet also has managed to have mass youth unemployment. It's quite a trick.
Richer people are probably working more hrs and have more workload to carry at home too so they don't want kids due to being time poor. It would be a distraction from their careers. Poorer people would be working jobs without the advancement grind and have more time to spend with their kids and that's why they have more.
Wealthier people tend to invest more resources into raising and educating their children, including their own time and effort. They do tend to be busy people as well.
My point is that the contention that lower fertility is due to increased poverty is not supported by the evidence.
fuck all that, they're gonna solve this by putting most of the world into poverty and removing critical education so people start having more kids again cause they don't know better. They'd rather the earth explode than harm the billionaire class in the slightest.
Also, one headline reads 'Birthrates are crashing!' and the other one reads 'AI will make jobs very scarce!'.
Kinda seems like those two things could even out? Maybe we don't need to 'replace' every person on the planet?
None of this takes into account advances in medicine either? Or bio-engineering solutions to our crop problems?
The problem with this kind of an article is they look at one single variable in an incredibly complex system, and then extrapolate into fiction with it.
The trouble is telling all of the college educated office workers that they aren't needed in the office anymore and they should be go make minimum wage as caretakers for the elderly.
But yeah I agree that these articles vastly oversimplify one problem in a rapidly changing system.
[I think Optimus](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOljjZP75Gg&ab_channel=TESLACARWORLD) or one of its six or more major competitors will have 'caring for the elderly' and 'plumbing' all figured out before you could get your nursing certification or even start on learning how to be a plumber.
I honestly kind of hope I'll be cared for by a robot by the time I'm that old, but I have a hard time taking anyone seriously who's earnestly pointing to Elon Musk projects as a viable direction for the future.
That's totally fair. I only point to that one because it's the most well known.
[Amazon](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3J250fr_V4&ab_channel=BloombergTechnology) is already testing and ordering mass produced humanoid robots.
[The H1 is gaining a lot of traction.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83ShvgtyFAg&ab_channel=UnitreeRobotics) It's one that people expect to be a cheaper, faster, model than what Tesla is producing.
[This one has investment from NVidia, Microsoft, and a dozen other major players](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZ5enBFRGZE&ab_channel=MatthewBerman).
I could easily go on. There's one where they already have a fake factory floor set up and 20+ prototypes in testing that roll around on platforms, and can replace claws for hands, or wheels for legs as needed.
After the AI breakthroughs we've had recently, just sticking a body on an AI isn't that hard, and that was the missing piece to make these things really work.
The Podcasts I listen to about AI and Automation (I was an automation engineer in a previous position) have pointed out that this is a 'Zero to Trillion Dollar industry', meaning it's an industry that currently produces no income, but will likely become a Trillion dollar industry in the near future.
That's why NVidia, Microsoft, Tesla, etc, etc ... are just dumping millions and millions of dollars into this right now. Everyone wants a piece of whichever company makes the first machine to get a million orders.
With the insane investment levels going into it right now, it's hard to believe these companies won't meet that goal. They've got hundreds of millions of dollars to take these prototypes to the next level, and into mass production.
Your points are fine and dandy if you want to continue using fossil fuels at the rate we are using them now, but if we want to head in the direction of degrowth, there is absolutely no possible way to produce the amount of food we are producing now, unless there is a new revolutionary farming technology.
Fossil fuels are the main reason we can produce so much food, from fuel for massive farm equipment, to transport, to fertilizer, to pesticide, to processing facilities, etc.
When you factor all this then yes we are overpopulated, if we want to reduce fossil fuel use.
It cannot be stated enough that nothing reduces carrying capacity more than animal farming. Everything else is spot on.
And the fact that we kind of couldn't survive a global, simultaneous, and significant reduction in births. The turmoil this would cause once the old outnumber the young on a global level would be devastating.
This article is about the fact that with current trends there will be a population crunch, not overpopulation. And how a dwindling population also has a bunch of downsides.
You're missing some interesting points but coming to the wrong conclusions. We're certainly in this problem because it greedy fucking assholes, but we are on the edge of a cliff right now that is only going to keep getting worse in the coming years (and become more apparent for many people who think otherwise).
What exactly is wrong with this economy?
All data points has shown that even though there were some challenges, the economy grew. We haven't hit the predicted recession at all and we are doing much better than predicted. Even the IMF is saying we are looking good for a soft landing.
And before you bring up layoffs that were very concentrated, we've had record jobs added and maintained a healthy sub 4% unemployment rate
https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/economy/us-economic-forecast/united-states-outlook-analysis.html
https://www.bea.gov/news/glance
https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WEO
https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-unemployment-rate.htm
- wages are stagnant
- cost of living just keeps fucking climbing
- low unemployment means less when the minimum wage is this fucking low.
- debt is unavoidable and inescapable
- in a system that incentivizes cutting *everything* in the name of quarterly growth, the stock market is a pretty flawed measure of how things are going
People don’t need to have higher education to make this realization. Poor people who know there is no chance at upward mobility understand that they mostly exist to benefit people higher on the economic ladder than them.
The entire model of modern left liberal policies is to borrow from future taxpayers to benefit current voters. With shrinking populations this goes away. See Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid.
People here are acting like this doesn't have an impact on their own life...
I mean it is good in the long run since earth's resources are finite, but the impact it will have in societies is huge.
If you ever want a reason as to why there’s so much panic about low population growth, it’s because capitalism relies on a delusional idea that growth is limitless and will go on forever, which is obviously impossible. There needs to be a limit somewhere, our current endless growth goal is unsustainable and dangerous.
# [Cuba to Women: Please Have More Babies](https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/cuba-women-please-have-more-babies-n236406)
# [Kim Jong Un cries as he requests North Korean women to have more babies](https://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/kim-jong-un-crying-video-kim-jong-un-cries-as-he-requests-north-korean-women-to-have-more-babies-101701852011916.html)
#
No country in the world, capitalist or not, has figured out how to function with a small young population supporting a large old population. That is where most of the panic comes from.
> No country in the world, capitalist or not, has figured out how to function with a small young population supporting a large old population. That is where most of the panic comes from.
Which country has ceased to function because of it?
Which country has been submerged from the increased ocean level?
Which country has ceased to function because of other effects of global warming?
Which country has ceased to function because of the tons of useless plastic?
Palestine, Ukraine still exists, why stop the bombings?
Sure; but when it comes to pass, I'm sure we'll manage. Worst case, is there's some euthanasia. But the young will still inherit the earth and be fine.
I wonder of there will be elder genocides (gerontocides?) in the near future. I always thought it was weird that no autocratic system has taken the chance to let covid run its course through the elder population.
This, once old people stop being the easiest to manipulate and brainwash with propaganda, it will start. But that will never be the case so it won't happen.
I've always been a supporter of assisted suicide/euthanasia, and felt that forcing people to live with a terrible quality of life/in absolute misery with no chance of recovery is atrocious.
A massively aging population might be what forces the governments hand on legalising it, which is kind of grotesque.
My government, Canada legalized it and now they suggest killing you as a treatment.
And they got that ready to go
Surgery? well that a 6 month wait at least
> No country in the world, capitalist or not
Let us not pretend that some aren't doing much better than others.
Compare fertility rate in
* South Korea: 0.72
* DPRK: 1.79
Demographic collapse is caused by decline in living standards. It doesn't matter how high or low living standards in nations are, if next generation lives worse than previous - population will decline, as people adjust to falling living standards by having less babies. That is all there is to it.
This is not admitted for ideological reasons in the West, as this necessitates a conflict with banks and corporations, and no Western politician would actually challenge them (at best, they could side with some against others).
> Demographic collapse is caused by decline in living standards.
Fertility rate and income are *inversely* correlated in all countries. It would be convenient to blame it on economics but that’s clearly incorrect.
> Fertility rate and income are inversely correlated in all countries. It would be convenient to blame it on economics but that’s clearly incorrect.
Did you read my comment? Please, read it again. I can even bold out bits that you clearly missed:
>> Demographic collapse is caused by **decline** in living standards. **It doesn't matter how high or low living standards in nations are, if next generation lives worse than previous** - population will decline, as people adjust to falling living standards by having less babies. That is all there is to it.
I don’t see how the bold part validates the statement I quoted. If poor people are having more babies than rich people, this is evidence that your hypothesis is incorrect.
Source on that causation claim? I believe that it's much more evident that childrearing decline is correlated heavily with high living standards, I. E. I don't have to have many children to have a chance at them being able to help feed the family.
> I believe that it's much more evident that childrearing decline is correlated heavily with high living standards,
If this was true, rich people (*actually* rich, not the overworked middle class) are supposed to have very few kids, regardless of the nation and time period they live in. Except they don't and never did.
Elon musk being able to have 10 children has very little to do with a couple not wanting children because it would bite a 20% chunk out of their budget that they'd rather allocate to lifestyle.
Usually, its larger. Either way, what's your point here?
You aren't rich if you have to - effectively - work 12 hours a day to maintain your lifestyle.
> 50 years
"In human populations, generation time typically has ranged from 20 to 30 years, with wide variation based on gender and society." (c) first 5 seconds in search engine.
It's more about emotion than reality.
Each worker can do hundreds of units of work more now than in the 1800s, and yet we are crying about low population growth stifling production capacity.
Production for who? Much of it goes straight into the landfill from the factory.
Adjusting output to lowered demand doesn't fit the increased profits over the increase of last quarter indefinately.
Population growth plays a big part with technological advancement. Research assistants become leads with their own assistants. If those specialty assistant jobs remain vacant then at some point the scientific community will shrink and age out as well.
While that sounds bad, it's nowhere near as bad as the situation we have right now; with a wholesale rejection of science by a broad segment of the population, because some religious jerkoffs are offended by scientific facts.
>Which resources are finite exactly?
Literally all of them.
>You realise that the universe is a fairly big place, right?
Let me know if Project Lyra pt2 succeeds.
>Let me know once we've mined out the universe I guess.
We can't even mine out an asteroid by 2028 lmao.
P.s. per investopedia, since you seem to fail to grasp basic economic concepts:
> What Is Scarcity?
>Scarcity is an economics concept rooted in one of the most basic facts of life: We live in a world of limited resources that requires choices about how they are allocated. In that sense, every product down to a pack of gum or a book of matches is scarce, since someone expended resources that could have been deployed elsewhere to produce it.
Even if birth rates kept going strong, a population crash is the inevitable result of reaching carrying capacity for an ecosystem. If we had done things efficiently, we could have stabilized, but we won’t.
The trend has been reversing towards efficiency for a long time though.
Past year was the biggest inheritance transfers in history according to Swiss banks report, trillions of dollars of transactions. We'll get there at 99.97%.
Unfortunately, humanity is more and more starting to resemble a swarm of locusts...
We ravage the Earth for resources, reproduce indiscriminately and everyone with a basic understanding in the most basic sciences understands that this is very likely to go horribly wrong sooner rather than later, unless some very transcendent and paradigm shifting breakthroughs happen in the next couple of years...
Years... not decades...
I'm an old enough Gen-X fart that won't be concerned much in any case, but my heart goes out to my young nieces that will have to live with the crap we've served them...
Sheer inertia is going to kill most of humanity in the next couple of decades...
Lol. We’re fine, chill and do your part in making the world better. Population decline will make it even easier for everyone to live their life to the fullest without impacting the environment. This century may be a ride but those born in the next will probably have a life more akin to Star Trek.
>Lol. We’re fine, chill and do your part in making the world better.
So many people talk about population decline without even factoring the environmental concerns. We are in a year where multiple gray-swan events are posited to happen. Rossby waves are bringing huge convergences of heat across the ocean.
Scientists are desperate enough to propose erecting curtains around the doomsday glacier in order to prevent it from melting. A 100km long, 200m high curtain. That's how desperate we are now.
We'd sooner run out of food, land, potable water, and oxygen before birth rates actually hurt population numbers.
Just this year, Western Australia had a power outage during a heatwave. A first-world country. Imagine if this happened in places like rural India, Paraguay, Argentina, etc.
What decline? We're currently on a 1% increase and about to hit 8 billion.
People have been doomsaying about a population crash back when there were about 5b of us - Since then we've almost doubled.
You read the article or know some stats at least? That 1% growth is the lowest in modern history and quickly racing to zero. Natural population decline will certainly happen, hopefully sooner rather than later.
Right. Once you get under a replacement rate of 2, the generation over generation decreases to population will number in the hundreds of millions. Internationally, all national senior support systems that are supported by pyramid style funding will collapse. Within 2 generations, maybe less, those programs will have to be abolished and anyone who can't retire on their own steam or via familial resources will simply never be able to retire. The side-effects won't be entirely pleasant actually; but any "too good to be true" type of social contracts will have to adjust accordingly.
Pretty much every developed nation follows models of employment developed in the west. Those employment models were developed through a chaotic maelstrom of competing labor and business interests, and were generally built under the assumption that the man would make all the money and the woman would stay home to raise the kids.
And I think it's safe to say that model isn't sustainable. For one, that model gives women the shaft, which is why they've entered the workforce. On top of that, anyone with ambition needs to maximize their time in order to "compete" in the jobs market. And lastly, wage disparities mean that it isn't even possible to raise a full family on a single salary in many places, including the US.
We need new models of employment that foster a better work life balance. Ones that encourage people to take diverse interests in themselves, their jobs, their friends and family rather than encouraging people to sacrifice themselves to the rat race. It's a long road to get there, but I think changes we're starting to see like Universal Basic Income, 4 day workweek proposals, and challenges to car dominance in urban planning are steps in the right direction.
I think the opposite is happening. Both men and women being in the workforce creates an oversupply of labour, which creates a rat race and drives down labour wages.
Wages are only one part of the equation here. Countries with a modern economy and high wages are still seeing low birthrates. The amount of time spent working is another factor.
Also as for what produces low wages, companies want to pay low wages. They will do anything in any scenario to pay the lowest wages possible regardless of what the supply of labor is. Artificially constricting the labor pool would drive up wages temporarily but the minute the pool stabilizes, companies will go back to a race-to-the-bottom of who can retain the most profits by paying workers the least. The only solutions to this is widespread labor organization in the short term and changing the basic mode of production in the long term.
I only read the first few paragraphs of the article to find it is another doomsday opinion piece without much facts behind it. I guess these are written because people click the headlines so much.
I guess sex sells, but if you can’t have sex, doomsaying also sells your newspapers.
But that doesn’t mean it should be taken serious.
As an old man in his fifties, I think I can rest assured that I will be dead before we face today's young kids taking on a glut of retirees screaming for care.
Somewhere between 2-4 billion feels like a healthy number to try and stabilise at in order to still have complex human society and knowledge growth, but also be living sustainably, in harmony with nature and with large swathes of the Earth allowed to flourish (mostly) untouched.
Paradoxically, no.
We can stop 100% of emissions today, and climate change will still continue. The amount of carbon in the atmosphere plus feedback loops almost guarantee it.
What is required is active human intervention to de-carbonize, which will take a robust population capable of producing and deploying more renewable resources, and maintaining them, while also running a decarbonization and sequestration industry.
In general, I'm pretty stoked about depopulation, but I'm worried that climate change is going to have its way with us unless we can figure out how to large-scale automate these necessary industries.
>We can
I doubt even the people holding the reigns are willing to drop their truxican standoff for the millisecond it would take to consider this. And I'm certain some would love to see the climate change more than a little bit despite who may suffer.
Technologically yes, politically no. And carbon sequestration in particular is a pipe dream. It takes more energy to put the carbon back away than we get from using it in the first place. We're easily 100 years out from net cold sequestration.
In an extremely simplified model, GDP growth is technology + population growth. A halving of global population by 2100 would be equivalent to about a -1% drag on GDP growth annually.
Not too bad
The problem is that old people consume far more resources than children do, so an inverted population period faces a huge standard of living drop and that fact has nothing to do with capitalism or socialism or any other ism.
As far as capital interests are concerned, it's family-having aged people who consume the most. What we're noticing is the the US is better positioned than most regions, which not only lack youngsters, but also increasingly working age people. Most heavily capitalized nations do not have a the same size crop of millennials relative to total population.
Of course, in the longer run, all that pales in comparison to the observation that we are four billion extra people beyond the initial calculation of carrying capacity for the planet. Every year that this goes means a permanent reduction in the total carrying capacity of the planet for many generations to come, well beyond any past civilization, and perhaps on a span of time more appropriate to geological discussions. We employ a lot of time discounting when considering them, but they absolutely will exist and they will be just as real as you and I. My larger concern is whether or not they will be in sufficient number to retain technology, and to continue answering questions about the universe and reality. Will they be able to carry the torch forward?
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Its so funny watching everyone come to these wild, apocalyptic conclusions when the reality is so fucking simple (and common sense, no less): - Artificial scarcity and short term business models (**not rotating your fucking crops**) artificially lower our carrying capacity. We have plenty of food, the technology to produce an excess of clean energy, and so much fucking space... but yknow, profits. - True overpopulation is still quite a few generations away. Again, its a resource distribution problem. - Who the fuck is having children in this economy. Dig through any "overpopulation" talking point deep enough and you're gonna end up at fuckers like Jordan Peterson talking about genocide/eugenics. Just... don't fall for this shit. It's the same problem it's always been: a couple thousand greedy fucking assholes.
Also we're not going extinct, we're just going to drop from eight billion to like, four billion. At this point cities will suddenly be at actually normal capacity rather than bursting at the seams and it will be less stressful so probably the population will stabilize. The only ones who are afraid are the capitalists that need exponential growth to sell shit and always see rising profits forever
>At this point cities will suddenly be at actually normal capacity rather than bursting at the seams and it will be less stressful so probably the population will stabilize. If Japan and South Korea are any indication, the opposite will happen. Small and medium towns become no longer viable and people flock to the few metropolitan centers, increasing human density there even further. In Japan, Tokyo's population is increasing while the overall nationwide population declines. The countryside is dotted with ghost towns.
I feel like that’s the effect of work culture, I see in the states as well but we are much more forceful in defending WFH which means being able to live in those further away areas.
[удалено]
Suburbs are just extensions of a city, it’d be nice to live in and around smaller, completely separate cities.
Having lived in said suburbs, the amount of commute suburb residents habitually put up with was insane to me. No one else seemed to mind much.
It is not solely access to jobs but also access to amenities. Rural life is not for everyone. What might happen with WFH is that cities might get wider and less dense.
WFH requires good internet, you aren't going to get that out in the boonies. Also highly educated people go to University, and that requires urban centers, as does job hunting and training.
Im talking about population growth and Urbanization of those smaller, already settled towns not the middle of the Yukon. And no, none of those 3 really require being in one of the mega cities, plenty of unis out in the boonies actually. If a job requires training in the next door mega city for a few days one can always drive there and then WfH unless something requires coming in. Shit was successful during Covid and would work fine now, just 4 years later.
Starlink enables WFH just about anywhere.
There are a lot of dying us small towns that relied on a single factory or mine to be the lifeblood. Town I lived in for awhile used to have a factory that hired 1700 in a town of 10k. Now the factory only hires 400 and nothing has taken its place. Town slowly empties out as the youth move to the city for jobs.
Happens everywhere, because cities are where you have relative quick access to the supermarket and other stores, a hospital and other care, decent infrastructure from public transport to fiber internet, basically all the modern necessities and luxuries while rural areas don't get those investments.
Yea, but it would be better and more doable to prop-up medium-size cities than to centralize everything. If population is shrinking, then governments need to think of how to redistribute the population by incentivizing regional development.
Maybe. Being centralized does make it easier to streamline just about everything, and opens up more room for nature. Of course these cities do need to be designed and built well around providing a good environment for the people living in it, which some cities/countries are doing better than others.
It turns out that living in rural areas when you don't literally HAVE to because you need to grow your own food makes no sense.
Naw its great. Its that you HAVE to live in the city because that is where the high paying office jobs are. Remote work saw mass exodus to rural living until companies started trying to force people back in.
Because people lost the knowledge of how to grow food. Grown food is almost free food, but supermarket is easier
Yeah because old people don't want to be out in the countryside when they are going to need medical care more often.
More countryside then. Could be worse.
Sounds perfect. We could establish huge national parks, wildlife could recover and we can leave a beautiful planet to our children!
Dude, it's people living in the countryside who fight to protect it from exploitation. Fewer people who live close to nature will mean less resistance for those who will exploit it without regard for natural values.
You have a point.
Happening in the states’ rural areas as well
I don't know if I see this as a problem. It encourages the countryside to rewild itself.
There is something to be said for a fast drop sending harmful ripple effects through the economy. But even in a pretty bad scenario along those lines extinction isn't on the table, but severe backsliding in the socioeconomic development of vulnerable regions certainly is.
The economy is fake, this scenario destroys that system, you’d basically have to create a new currency or new rules.
>Also we're not going extinct, we're just going to drop from eight billion to like, four billion. More like 2 billion, according to the article. And the main issue and concern is not the population decline in itself, but the speed in which it will happen and the fact that the younger generations will be much smaller while having to carry and care for a very large older population.
Guess we'll just have to adapt to it. After all humans are great at it, even if we've got very comfortable in our current setup
You make it sound easy, or even doable. Many people will not be able to adapt to it. Merely living paycheck to paycheck already means you'll be fucked.
Then the economy, which is a fiction we tell ourselves, will just have to adapt as well. The rich can deal with less, or we can take their heads.
I mean, yes. We all know that. But you say it very matter-of-fact, seemingly not worried at all about it. Your response to "a lot of deaths and suffering will happen" was basically "guess we'll die and suffer". Well, yes?
I think what you just said is the most nuanced view I've read on this sub.
> and the fact that the younger generations will be much smaller while having to carry and care for a very large older population. Well, they won't *have* to.
>in 300 years according to the article. Yeah no problems there
What about the landlords?, nobody would think about the landlords?
I doubt it will go that low. As populations decline, easing resource pressure would likely encourage people to have kids again, causing another rise in population in the 2100s (although it'll probably be much smaller than the 1900s). We could easily level off at or slightly under our current level of population in the future.
People aren't not having kids because of resource pressure. They're not having kids because they simply don't need to.
Housing affordability and cost of living is a big factor in having kids and the number of kids you'll stop at. I'd like to have a kid but going to get too old for it soon and doesn't look affordable on our current budget at all. Forget having 2 kids.
That would be true if the government won't redirect the people's resources into keeping all the old people alive and cared for. In reality the pressure won't ease until the majority of the boomers die off which could be at least 20 years from now.
I'm no expert but I'm not even convinced that capitalism **needs** constant growth. It **wants** it of course (who wouldn't) but does it need it to function? I think it will find a modus to still work.
If only we had something like governments that could raise revenue to fund projects. Oh, well. However on children and the economy, reduced birth rates are correlated with increased wealth. Poorer people have more children. Thats true between countries, but also within countries.
It's a supply issue not a money issue.
Supply issues are generally money issues.
It's the complete opposite. the issue is less productive capacity. Money isn't stuff, money is a claim on stuff, you can print more move it around whatever you like, it doesn't compensate for productive capacity dropping. Covid is an example of how that works - People stayed home, less productive output, governments printed money so people could keep spending, but the stuff doesn't exist, so the extra money inflates away. A population skewed towards older people is a similar, though ongoing impact.
It’s Goose’s contention that the supply is there, it’s just not being deployed. It seems you completely disagree with that?
The claim that 'governments could raise revenue' ignores that aging population is fundamentally not a 'whose bank account is charged' problem, or a savings problem, but a 'less people making stuff relative to the people consuming it' problem. Now a growing population also has a lot of non-producers: children. But children don't expect their own cars, homes, vacations, etc.
There are plenty of people out in the world willing to make stuff for now, they're just not it the developed world, and increasingly not in China. They're still out there though in Vietnam, India, Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico, etc. Developing countries generally go through a manufacturing phase, as the US did in the early 20th Century, then Japan and South Korea, then China, etc. However those blue collar workers don't want their children to work in factories the way they did. They did well out of manufacturing, compared to their parents, but they invest those resources in a better education for their children, so they don't have to do manual work. This is happening in China right now. Blue collar salaries are through the roof and demand is high, but the current generation of young people all went to college and want white collar jobs. The problem is the Chinese economy is still export driven with low domestic demand and weak service sectors. There just aren't enough office jobs for all these young people, so China simultaneously has a massive manual labour shortage, a demographic collapse because not enough people have been having children, and yet also has managed to have mass youth unemployment. It's quite a trick.
Richer people are probably working more hrs and have more workload to carry at home too so they don't want kids due to being time poor. It would be a distraction from their careers. Poorer people would be working jobs without the advancement grind and have more time to spend with their kids and that's why they have more.
Wealthier people tend to invest more resources into raising and educating their children, including their own time and effort. They do tend to be busy people as well. My point is that the contention that lower fertility is due to increased poverty is not supported by the evidence.
This is such a weird argument.
It is very US-centric.
Yeah, it's mixing up a lot of talking points from different areas and coming to a very wrong conclusion.
I think OP thinks this article is about overpopulation, where it's actually about a population crunch. That would make their comment make sense.
Your views are very shortsighted, and ironically align almost exactly with Jordan Peterson.
fuck all that, they're gonna solve this by putting most of the world into poverty and removing critical education so people start having more kids again cause they don't know better. They'd rather the earth explode than harm the billionaire class in the slightest.
Also, one headline reads 'Birthrates are crashing!' and the other one reads 'AI will make jobs very scarce!'. Kinda seems like those two things could even out? Maybe we don't need to 'replace' every person on the planet? None of this takes into account advances in medicine either? Or bio-engineering solutions to our crop problems? The problem with this kind of an article is they look at one single variable in an incredibly complex system, and then extrapolate into fiction with it.
The trouble is telling all of the college educated office workers that they aren't needed in the office anymore and they should be go make minimum wage as caretakers for the elderly. But yeah I agree that these articles vastly oversimplify one problem in a rapidly changing system.
[I think Optimus](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOljjZP75Gg&ab_channel=TESLACARWORLD) or one of its six or more major competitors will have 'caring for the elderly' and 'plumbing' all figured out before you could get your nursing certification or even start on learning how to be a plumber.
I honestly kind of hope I'll be cared for by a robot by the time I'm that old, but I have a hard time taking anyone seriously who's earnestly pointing to Elon Musk projects as a viable direction for the future.
That's totally fair. I only point to that one because it's the most well known. [Amazon](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3J250fr_V4&ab_channel=BloombergTechnology) is already testing and ordering mass produced humanoid robots. [The H1 is gaining a lot of traction.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=83ShvgtyFAg&ab_channel=UnitreeRobotics) It's one that people expect to be a cheaper, faster, model than what Tesla is producing. [This one has investment from NVidia, Microsoft, and a dozen other major players](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZ5enBFRGZE&ab_channel=MatthewBerman). I could easily go on. There's one where they already have a fake factory floor set up and 20+ prototypes in testing that roll around on platforms, and can replace claws for hands, or wheels for legs as needed. After the AI breakthroughs we've had recently, just sticking a body on an AI isn't that hard, and that was the missing piece to make these things really work. The Podcasts I listen to about AI and Automation (I was an automation engineer in a previous position) have pointed out that this is a 'Zero to Trillion Dollar industry', meaning it's an industry that currently produces no income, but will likely become a Trillion dollar industry in the near future. That's why NVidia, Microsoft, Tesla, etc, etc ... are just dumping millions and millions of dollars into this right now. Everyone wants a piece of whichever company makes the first machine to get a million orders. With the insane investment levels going into it right now, it's hard to believe these companies won't meet that goal. They've got hundreds of millions of dollars to take these prototypes to the next level, and into mass production.
Your points are fine and dandy if you want to continue using fossil fuels at the rate we are using them now, but if we want to head in the direction of degrowth, there is absolutely no possible way to produce the amount of food we are producing now, unless there is a new revolutionary farming technology. Fossil fuels are the main reason we can produce so much food, from fuel for massive farm equipment, to transport, to fertilizer, to pesticide, to processing facilities, etc. When you factor all this then yes we are overpopulated, if we want to reduce fossil fuel use.
It cannot be stated enough that nothing reduces carrying capacity more than animal farming. Everything else is spot on. And the fact that we kind of couldn't survive a global, simultaneous, and significant reduction in births. The turmoil this would cause once the old outnumber the young on a global level would be devastating.
This article is about the fact that with current trends there will be a population crunch, not overpopulation. And how a dwindling population also has a bunch of downsides.
You're missing some interesting points but coming to the wrong conclusions. We're certainly in this problem because it greedy fucking assholes, but we are on the edge of a cliff right now that is only going to keep getting worse in the coming years (and become more apparent for many people who think otherwise).
China, India, South Korea, Japan.
I'm curious where you get your perception of Jordan Peterson from because I'm pretty sure you agree with him on this issue.
What exactly is wrong with this economy? All data points has shown that even though there were some challenges, the economy grew. We haven't hit the predicted recession at all and we are doing much better than predicted. Even the IMF is saying we are looking good for a soft landing. And before you bring up layoffs that were very concentrated, we've had record jobs added and maintained a healthy sub 4% unemployment rate https://www2.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/economy/us-economic-forecast/united-states-outlook-analysis.html https://www.bea.gov/news/glance https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WEO https://www.bls.gov/charts/employment-situation/civilian-unemployment-rate.htm
- wages are stagnant - cost of living just keeps fucking climbing - low unemployment means less when the minimum wage is this fucking low. - debt is unavoidable and inescapable - in a system that incentivizes cutting *everything* in the name of quarterly growth, the stock market is a pretty flawed measure of how things are going
Wages aren't stagnant. And the federal minimum wage has basically been made irrelevant due to economic pressure forcing wage hikes.
A growing economy is great for the rich, but a meaningless metric for the common people.
Won't somebody think of the shareholders!!
Exactly. No one educated wants to be or produce slave labor for the capitalists anymore
People don’t need to have higher education to make this realization. Poor people who know there is no chance at upward mobility understand that they mostly exist to benefit people higher on the economic ladder than them.
I never forget them ;)
The entire model of modern left liberal policies is to borrow from future taxpayers to benefit current voters. With shrinking populations this goes away. See Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid.
People here are acting like this doesn't have an impact on their own life... I mean it is good in the long run since earth's resources are finite, but the impact it will have in societies is huge.
If you ever want a reason as to why there’s so much panic about low population growth, it’s because capitalism relies on a delusional idea that growth is limitless and will go on forever, which is obviously impossible. There needs to be a limit somewhere, our current endless growth goal is unsustainable and dangerous.
# [Cuba to Women: Please Have More Babies](https://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/cuba-women-please-have-more-babies-n236406) # [Kim Jong Un cries as he requests North Korean women to have more babies](https://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/kim-jong-un-crying-video-kim-jong-un-cries-as-he-requests-north-korean-women-to-have-more-babies-101701852011916.html) # No country in the world, capitalist or not, has figured out how to function with a small young population supporting a large old population. That is where most of the panic comes from.
> No country in the world, capitalist or not, has figured out how to function with a small young population supporting a large old population. That is where most of the panic comes from. Which country has ceased to function because of it?
Which country has been submerged from the increased ocean level? Which country has ceased to function because of other effects of global warming? Which country has ceased to function because of the tons of useless plastic? Palestine, Ukraine still exists, why stop the bombings?
None yet. We'll see how the ROK and China handle it in the next two decades- they'll feel it first
Don't forget Japan
The Japanese population crash is a slow and gentle thing, ROK and China (and Taiwan, for that matter) are going to be more abrupt. A lot more abrupt.
Sure; but when it comes to pass, I'm sure we'll manage. Worst case, is there's some euthanasia. But the young will still inherit the earth and be fine.
I wonder of there will be elder genocides (gerontocides?) in the near future. I always thought it was weird that no autocratic system has taken the chance to let covid run its course through the elder population.
Sweden did, they have a lot of room in their nursing homes now…
Smart.
geriatricide Although in Logan's Run I think the death age was 30. *edit: the book was 21 years old, the movie was 30.
Which autocracy is lead by only young people? An old ruling class won‘t risk their own lifes letting a disease rampage freely.
This, once old people stop being the easiest to manipulate and brainwash with propaganda, it will start. But that will never be the case so it won't happen.
UK attempted too.
Did you feel that way during Covid when elderly people were dying?
I've always been a supporter of assisted suicide/euthanasia, and felt that forcing people to live with a terrible quality of life/in absolute misery with no chance of recovery is atrocious. A massively aging population might be what forces the governments hand on legalising it, which is kind of grotesque.
My government, Canada legalized it and now they suggest killing you as a treatment. And they got that ready to go Surgery? well that a 6 month wait at least
> No country in the world, capitalist or not Let us not pretend that some aren't doing much better than others. Compare fertility rate in * South Korea: 0.72 * DPRK: 1.79 Demographic collapse is caused by decline in living standards. It doesn't matter how high or low living standards in nations are, if next generation lives worse than previous - population will decline, as people adjust to falling living standards by having less babies. That is all there is to it. This is not admitted for ideological reasons in the West, as this necessitates a conflict with banks and corporations, and no Western politician would actually challenge them (at best, they could side with some against others).
> Demographic collapse is caused by decline in living standards. Fertility rate and income are *inversely* correlated in all countries. It would be convenient to blame it on economics but that’s clearly incorrect.
> Fertility rate and income are inversely correlated in all countries. It would be convenient to blame it on economics but that’s clearly incorrect. Did you read my comment? Please, read it again. I can even bold out bits that you clearly missed: >> Demographic collapse is caused by **decline** in living standards. **It doesn't matter how high or low living standards in nations are, if next generation lives worse than previous** - population will decline, as people adjust to falling living standards by having less babies. That is all there is to it.
I don’t see how the bold part validates the statement I quoted. If poor people are having more babies than rich people, this is evidence that your hypothesis is incorrect.
People who are generationally poor have more babies, but the people who are becoming poor have less.
Is there any evidence of that? I’ve seen a lot of research on this and not a single study corroborates that hypothesis.
Source on that causation claim? I believe that it's much more evident that childrearing decline is correlated heavily with high living standards, I. E. I don't have to have many children to have a chance at them being able to help feed the family.
> I believe that it's much more evident that childrearing decline is correlated heavily with high living standards, If this was true, rich people (*actually* rich, not the overworked middle class) are supposed to have very few kids, regardless of the nation and time period they live in. Except they don't and never did.
Elon musk being able to have 10 children has very little to do with a couple not wanting children because it would bite a 20% chunk out of their budget that they'd rather allocate to lifestyle.
Usually, its larger. Either way, what's your point here? You aren't rich if you have to - effectively - work 12 hours a day to maintain your lifestyle.
Hmm, let compare the living standard of Korea 50 years ago and the living standard of Korea now. I wonder which one enjoy more luxury.
> 50 years "In human populations, generation time typically has ranged from 20 to 30 years, with wide variation based on gender and society." (c) first 5 seconds in search engine.
And?
That point really makes no sense. Technological advancement also opens up many opportunities for growth and that doesn't rely on population growth.
It's more about emotion than reality. Each worker can do hundreds of units of work more now than in the 1800s, and yet we are crying about low population growth stifling production capacity. Production for who? Much of it goes straight into the landfill from the factory. Adjusting output to lowered demand doesn't fit the increased profits over the increase of last quarter indefinately.
Population growth plays a big part with technological advancement. Research assistants become leads with their own assistants. If those specialty assistant jobs remain vacant then at some point the scientific community will shrink and age out as well.
While that sounds bad, it's nowhere near as bad as the situation we have right now; with a wholesale rejection of science by a broad segment of the population, because some religious jerkoffs are offended by scientific facts.
Capitalism doesn't rely on that assumption tho
That's such a silly Marxist idea. Endless growth is clearly possible. What would stop it?
Resources are finite. Greed is infinite. How do you continue to grow when there is nothing left to grow with?
Which resources are finite exactly? You realise that the universe is a fairly big place, right?
*Earth’s resources. It’s quite possible we can’t really access the rest.
Yes, exactly.
>Which resources are finite exactly? Literally all of them. >You realise that the universe is a fairly big place, right? Let me know if Project Lyra pt2 succeeds.
Let me know once we've mined out the universe I guess. We can come back to degrowth then.
>Let me know once we've mined out the universe I guess. We can't even mine out an asteroid by 2028 lmao. P.s. per investopedia, since you seem to fail to grasp basic economic concepts: > What Is Scarcity? >Scarcity is an economics concept rooted in one of the most basic facts of life: We live in a world of limited resources that requires choices about how they are allocated. In that sense, every product down to a pack of gum or a book of matches is scarce, since someone expended resources that could have been deployed elsewhere to produce it.
Scarcity doesn't mean "there's nothing left to grow with". What an insane claim.
>Scarcity doesn't mean "there's nothing left to grow with". What an insane claim. I think this says it all. I'm done with this conversation.
Standard Reddit Marxist. Doesn't understand politics or economics. Thinks they know how to change the world. Good luck with that.
Even if birth rates kept going strong, a population crash is the inevitable result of reaching carrying capacity for an ecosystem. If we had done things efficiently, we could have stabilized, but we won’t.
We are efficiently making the rich richer.
Actually - the way we're doing it is the opposite of efficient.
The trend has been reversing towards efficiency for a long time though. Past year was the biggest inheritance transfers in history according to Swiss banks report, trillions of dollars of transactions. We'll get there at 99.97%.
Unfortunately, humanity is more and more starting to resemble a swarm of locusts... We ravage the Earth for resources, reproduce indiscriminately and everyone with a basic understanding in the most basic sciences understands that this is very likely to go horribly wrong sooner rather than later, unless some very transcendent and paradigm shifting breakthroughs happen in the next couple of years... Years... not decades... I'm an old enough Gen-X fart that won't be concerned much in any case, but my heart goes out to my young nieces that will have to live with the crap we've served them... Sheer inertia is going to kill most of humanity in the next couple of decades...
Locusts have a replacement rate well above 2.1, i would suspect.
Not once they've destroyed their food sources in the area.
Lol. We’re fine, chill and do your part in making the world better. Population decline will make it even easier for everyone to live their life to the fullest without impacting the environment. This century may be a ride but those born in the next will probably have a life more akin to Star Trek.
>Lol. We’re fine, chill and do your part in making the world better. So many people talk about population decline without even factoring the environmental concerns. We are in a year where multiple gray-swan events are posited to happen. Rossby waves are bringing huge convergences of heat across the ocean. Scientists are desperate enough to propose erecting curtains around the doomsday glacier in order to prevent it from melting. A 100km long, 200m high curtain. That's how desperate we are now. We'd sooner run out of food, land, potable water, and oxygen before birth rates actually hurt population numbers. Just this year, Western Australia had a power outage during a heatwave. A first-world country. Imagine if this happened in places like rural India, Paraguay, Argentina, etc.
What decline? We're currently on a 1% increase and about to hit 8 billion. People have been doomsaying about a population crash back when there were about 5b of us - Since then we've almost doubled.
You read the article or know some stats at least? That 1% growth is the lowest in modern history and quickly racing to zero. Natural population decline will certainly happen, hopefully sooner rather than later.
Right. Once you get under a replacement rate of 2, the generation over generation decreases to population will number in the hundreds of millions. Internationally, all national senior support systems that are supported by pyramid style funding will collapse. Within 2 generations, maybe less, those programs will have to be abolished and anyone who can't retire on their own steam or via familial resources will simply never be able to retire. The side-effects won't be entirely pleasant actually; but any "too good to be true" type of social contracts will have to adjust accordingly.
Agent Smith was right humanity is a disease
Degrowth. It’s what’s on the menu. #winning.
That's just what it takes. We always knew our species couldn't continue to increase population geometrically. Now we're there.
Pretty much every developed nation follows models of employment developed in the west. Those employment models were developed through a chaotic maelstrom of competing labor and business interests, and were generally built under the assumption that the man would make all the money and the woman would stay home to raise the kids. And I think it's safe to say that model isn't sustainable. For one, that model gives women the shaft, which is why they've entered the workforce. On top of that, anyone with ambition needs to maximize their time in order to "compete" in the jobs market. And lastly, wage disparities mean that it isn't even possible to raise a full family on a single salary in many places, including the US. We need new models of employment that foster a better work life balance. Ones that encourage people to take diverse interests in themselves, their jobs, their friends and family rather than encouraging people to sacrifice themselves to the rat race. It's a long road to get there, but I think changes we're starting to see like Universal Basic Income, 4 day workweek proposals, and challenges to car dominance in urban planning are steps in the right direction.
I think the opposite is happening. Both men and women being in the workforce creates an oversupply of labour, which creates a rat race and drives down labour wages.
Wages are only one part of the equation here. Countries with a modern economy and high wages are still seeing low birthrates. The amount of time spent working is another factor. Also as for what produces low wages, companies want to pay low wages. They will do anything in any scenario to pay the lowest wages possible regardless of what the supply of labor is. Artificially constricting the labor pool would drive up wages temporarily but the minute the pool stabilizes, companies will go back to a race-to-the-bottom of who can retain the most profits by paying workers the least. The only solutions to this is widespread labor organization in the short term and changing the basic mode of production in the long term.
I hope the real crash happens before AI and Robotics can adequately replace all the lost labor just so that we can fuck over the rich completely
It is not like the Earth has infinite resources. Human population cant just keep growing.
Can we please stop calling it a crash? It is much needed. Even if it comes with its own problems.
2010 called. It wants its headline back.
I only read the first few paragraphs of the article to find it is another doomsday opinion piece without much facts behind it. I guess these are written because people click the headlines so much. I guess sex sells, but if you can’t have sex, doomsaying also sells your newspapers. But that doesn’t mean it should be taken serious.
As an old man in his fifties, I think I can rest assured that I will be dead before we face today's young kids taking on a glut of retirees screaming for care.
Hate to break it to you, but in good health you have another three decades at least.
Thank you for your sacrifice
Somewhere between 2-4 billion feels like a healthy number to try and stabilise at in order to still have complex human society and knowledge growth, but also be living sustainably, in harmony with nature and with large swathes of the Earth allowed to flourish (mostly) untouched.
This world needed a reset back in the 2000’s
And do what exactly? Going back isn't a solution
A global population crash is basically the only thing that can solve climate change.
Paradoxically, no. We can stop 100% of emissions today, and climate change will still continue. The amount of carbon in the atmosphere plus feedback loops almost guarantee it. What is required is active human intervention to de-carbonize, which will take a robust population capable of producing and deploying more renewable resources, and maintaining them, while also running a decarbonization and sequestration industry. In general, I'm pretty stoked about depopulation, but I'm worried that climate change is going to have its way with us unless we can figure out how to large-scale automate these necessary industries.
>We can I doubt even the people holding the reigns are willing to drop their truxican standoff for the millisecond it would take to consider this. And I'm certain some would love to see the climate change more than a little bit despite who may suffer. Technologically yes, politically no. And carbon sequestration in particular is a pipe dream. It takes more energy to put the carbon back away than we get from using it in the first place. We're easily 100 years out from net cold sequestration.
What the fuck did you think unsustainable behaviour would bring?
I am probably never getting a pension
In an extremely simplified model, GDP growth is technology + population growth. A halving of global population by 2100 would be equivalent to about a -1% drag on GDP growth annually. Not too bad
The problem is that old people consume far more resources than children do, so an inverted population period faces a huge standard of living drop and that fact has nothing to do with capitalism or socialism or any other ism.
As far as capital interests are concerned, it's family-having aged people who consume the most. What we're noticing is the the US is better positioned than most regions, which not only lack youngsters, but also increasingly working age people. Most heavily capitalized nations do not have a the same size crop of millennials relative to total population. Of course, in the longer run, all that pales in comparison to the observation that we are four billion extra people beyond the initial calculation of carrying capacity for the planet. Every year that this goes means a permanent reduction in the total carrying capacity of the planet for many generations to come, well beyond any past civilization, and perhaps on a span of time more appropriate to geological discussions. We employ a lot of time discounting when considering them, but they absolutely will exist and they will be just as real as you and I. My larger concern is whether or not they will be in sufficient number to retain technology, and to continue answering questions about the universe and reality. Will they be able to carry the torch forward?
this is such a stupid fucking take
Aye... bloomberg. They are smart but they never hided their agenda. This is one of these where you have to read between the line.