- cross-posted to:
- workreform@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- workreform@lemmy.world
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The people that want higher birth rates don’t care about higher wages, the environment, or people’s safety.
They just need workers they can milk them until they can’t work anymore. They need these workers to spend all their money so they have to keep working.
The endgame of capitalism is slavery.
The early game of capitalism was slavery
Midgame pretty much unions, now mostly a speed bump in the rearview mirror.
Perhaps that should change.
They also want to make sure people with a different skill color do not have more babies than them.
I think that’s actually the main reason.
Is skill coloured by the type of skill or by the level of skill?
By rarity.
And it never ever ever goes as planned because the bigots running the eugenics program are myopic twits.
This is the true purpose of religion: to maintain the conveyor belt of cheap workers/soldiers through ‘marriage’, also the same reason religious folk universally agree on banning abortion.
Population decline is fine. It’s the population boom driven by World War II panic that was the oddity instead.
In a matter of time, we might return to population levels from the 17th century, and if we do, then so what? A single individual will become all the more valuable, similar to how European nations valued labour more after the Black Death occurred. History likes to repeat itself, even if not necessarily by events like the plague.
Look what happened after the plague, 50% of the population was gone.
It broke the back of the Catholic church and feudalism. Peasants got their first pay raise… ever.
It broke the back of the Catholic church and feudalism. Peasants got their first pay raise… ever.
You’re missing maybe the most important part of this: …eventually. It was at least 40 years after the plague hit, and probably more like 70-100, depending how exactly you’re counting. AKA it might get better after we’re all dead
That seems…obvious?
Why would the effects of reduced population happen before the population is reduced?
I think there’s a comic series about that.
I think feudalism carried on for 200 more years
I’m not worried about population decline but regret to inform Anon that I was around when there were half as many people and it was not better. Sorry. There was terrible pollution and more crime.
8+ billion people on the planet and people complain about not enough people.
Ponzi schemes aren’t sustainable.
Yeah, people worried about “population decline” are actually concerned about their preferred race/religion losing political & cultural power.
It’s a dog whistle every time
It’s a dog whistle every time.
Population decline isn’t inherently a problem (unless you’re a racist worried about “your people” losing power). Too rapid population decline is a big problem. We’re already seeing the effects: When the sum of birth rates and working-age immigration fall fast enough, the ratio of working-age people to care-needing people also falls. I don’t think I need to explain why it’s a problem that every able-bodied working age adult will be responsible (directly or indirectly) for taking care of more people. It puts more pressure on everyone, and impacts societies ability to care for those in need of it.
A controlled, slow, population decline would probably just be a good thing at this point. However, that’s not what prognoses are pointing towards, and that’s why (non-racist) people are worried.
I’ll acknowledge that saying it’s a dog whistle every time was slightly hyperbolic.
However, I’d argue that the claim that the global human population is declining too rapidly is actually pretty hotly contested. The world’s population is still growing — around 8.2 billion now, heading toward a peak near 10.3 billion in the 2080s.
That being said, in some countries there will be a surplus of retirees and not enough workers to fund them through the existing tax structure, which is a legitimate problem. But it’s a problem best remedied through better social safety nets, not by popping out more babies.
The biggest contention I have with the concern over population decline is that population decline doesn’t matter at all if we don’t adequately address climate change within the next decade. If someone’s house is actively on fire and they express concern to me that their roof should be re-shingled, I’m not going to give a shit about their roof shingles until I’m certain their roof will survive the fire.
Thanks, that was a much more nuanced take that I have a much easier time agreeing with :)
I think the population problem has some in common with food distribution: There’s enough food in the world, it’s just distributed in such a way that some places have obesity as a societal-level issue, while other places people are dying of malnourishment.
Similarly, the global population is increasing, however it’s increasing far more rapidly that sustainable in some places, while declining more rapidly than sustainable in others.
There’s only so much you can do by redistributing wealth in a better way (which I think we should, regardless). It doesn’t help to tax the rich if there isn’t any manpower you can buy with that tax income to actually do the work that needs doing. I think that’s the scary part about a rapid population decline: We’re heading towards a situation (in some places) where the ratio of capable workers to people needing care approaches 2:1, which means a far larger fraction of the population will need to spend their entire working career as direct care providers than is currently the case. You can’t really alleviate a manpower shortage with just money.
I was gonna say we could start pushing people out on ice floes when they get past 60, but climate change is ruining that for us too.
Easy solution, eliminate the boomers. Crisis averted.
This is mostly a joke, but I do foresee a time when a very authoritarian government just kills a bunch of old people.
For example, during the One Child Policy the Chinese government did hundreds of thousands of forced abortions.
Hegemony is the word you’re looking for.
Yeah, always a dog whistle.
Why would I care about how many people are the same race as me? It could only be a problem if you keep racism.
it’s almost like you have your answer already
Worry about population decline isn’t about wanting more people. It’s about wanting there to be enough working-age people to cover the retirement and medical payments of the ones no longer working. We know exactly how many 30-year-olds we’ll have in 20 years and it’s simply not enough. Something has to give and usually the first to go is the benefits for the people who most need them.
Or maybe the something that has to give is a minority class of people (the .1%) getting a few percent higher tax “burden”
I highly doubt that would be anywhere near enough even if the issue was only limited to the country with the highest number of ultra wealthy people which it isn’t.
Elon Musk could end world hunger. Full stop. He wouldn’t even notice the dip in his finances. (He offered once, claiming if someone gave him a concrete number, he would pay it, and a nonprofit took him up on it. Surprise, surprise, the whiny little snit backed out.)
They totally could fix the problem. But to those rich shitheads, it’s not a problem. It’s a feature.
Sort of depend on perspective, hunger only exists because there’s no political will to remove it.
We produce more food globally than we consume, and we can multiply it several times with the same cost of space by swapping more meat for vegan crops.
We have plenty of space for everyone to have shelter, the problem is largely due to the issue that most people want to live in a metropolitan area. So the price for living in a highly sought out location increases to unmanageable levels.
A key factor is the big difference between the kinds of jobs you can get in a more rural location compared to the bigger urban centers. Everyone are forced to move to urban locations to study, causing most people to form their first adult social and professional circles around whichever urban location they studied at.
There’s a lot of minor things that needs to be done, what exactly differs by country. But making the rural regions more accessible to live in should be considered across most countries. One simple first step, would be to make remote capable jobs offer their workers to do it all remotely. Government office workers, could quite easily spearhead such an initiative; I bet some people would move closer to nature, if they could hold onto their bread
That falls back to “ponzi schemes aren’t sustainable”
It’s broken.
The problem with calling it a ponzi scheme is that this would apply in all contexts, even in very basic economies without money. If you have a tribe of hunter gathers and suddenly they have a sharp decrease in their birth rate, they too would have a hard time taking care of their elderly/children.
usually the first to go is the benefits for the people who most need them.
Then this way of life is not worth saving.
Why the obsession with only retirees? What matters is the dependency ratio.
The dependency ratio counts the total number of dependents, not just the retirees the eugenicists like to focus on. By the end of the century, globally we’ll have a dependency ratio similar to the level it was in the mid-20th century.
When do they teach ‘carrying capacity’ and what happens after it’s exceeded these days?
Houses are already kept artificially empty to retain prices. Capitalism always finds a way to screw you over.
When the population was predicted to explode into the 21st century, the news said this was a big problem. Now the population is expected to gradually decline. The news is saying this is a big problem.
“Change is a problem”
The news is autistic?
I think you mean to say conservative. People hate change regardless of positivity or level of train knowledge
Both can be a problem
What News is saying this?
The Onion of course, onionguy!
That can’t be true, everything the onion publishes, goes through me first, I would’ve seen that, trust me, I’m an expert. So who is spreading this?
Not all news, per se, but I do recall seeing reporting on how a good handful of countries are trying to combat falling birth rates. Like in Far East and Far North countries.
They are problems for different reasons
Booms have market opportunity, and busts have market opportunity.
That said, having too many people to do the work is a lot less dangerous than not enough people to do the work.
The bust comes with a high risk of a total economic collapse. Those houses get cheap, but food, sanitary, and energy security are at risk. Living in a rotting infrastructure is very different than living in an expanding but underdeveloped infrastructure.
Leveling out or a slow population decline would be good in some scenarios. If we’re going from 2.5:1 down to 0.25:1, you’ll end up with another boomer wave, pissed off at the government, ripe for scenarios that make today’s problems seem like an annoying party.
The rotting infrastructure problem is made a lot worse by urban sprawl
What happens in the rural areas when the need for grocery stores halves, all the walmarts pull out, we have to re-invent logistics. I expect people will either have to go back to making everything themselves, or they’ll have to bunch back together around resources.
Yeah. But people won’t change willingly. A lot of the suburbs around my city are pretty rich areas. I don’t expect those people to willingly move to the denser inner city anytime soon. More likely they’ll petition city hall to keep their subdivisions running until the city goes bankrupt from the financial burden of supporting a subdivision that does not bring in enough property taxes to support itself
“Nicer” cities are growing in almost all parts of the world, right? If anything, rural infrastructure will dwindle as people move to the cities for opportunities and amenities.
Ya know, I have vague memories of reading an argument somewhere that the black plague killed off so many peasants that the surviving ones had materially less shitty conditions for a little while, due to scarcity and all that.
Great news, we’re bringing the plague back too!
The actual disease caused by pest bacteria is easily treatable nowadays.
Facilitated by such space age concepts as washing your fucking hands and not drinking the corpse-water.
That’s “prevention” you’re talking about, not “treatment”, generally considered better, but still.
You must have missed the news. They’re making a new stronger plague now
:)U mean the one in Russia where one of the researchers recently died?
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Specifically, the peasants had more bargaining power for better conditions because the absolute decrease in their number made each of them more valuable to the ruling class as individuals. There was an increase in peasant revolts and concessions to the peasantry following the black death partly for this reason.
Peasants only got the ability to leave the land they were bound to to seek better employment elsewhere after the black plague.
This is true in places. There are also acounts of places where all the nobility died and the peasants threw weeks long parties.
Yup, labor scarcity meant higher wages and bargaining power.
We are humans and as such we have always adapted. We will adapt again. You can all live in fear re population decline if you like but I’m just getting on with it.
actually quite pragmatic 🤨
Unfortunately population decline isn’t always about low birth rates.
Who will pay to care for the aging population? Welp, whether you live in a socialised care country or the United hellscapes of America, the answer is: you will. Or your kids will, or whatever generation we’re talking about here.
Even if you do live in the US and have no elderly relatives, the insurance companies will have to hike the shit out of their premiums to remain profitable.
The fewer working age people there are compared to people past working age, the worse it will be.
Yeah but that’s just a pyramid scheme. We can’t just keep growing the human population forever.
Started working at 15, figure I’ll work till I’m 75. Or until I die, whatever. If I can. It’s fine, not ideal but fine. I would have appreciated maternity leave more than retirement. The time then would have been a lot more valuable.
Yep. There’s a big bowl of shit, and some day it must be eaten. The choice becomes: do you eat the shit, or do you add a little squirt and pass it to your kids?
Billionnaires.
I would imagine that the most cost-effective (realistic) way of solving it would be through some sort of culling.
Nothing flashy like forced euthanasia. But a reduction in available healthcare here, a drop in funding for elderly services there, some “dead weight” propaganda, and life expectancy would sink like a brick; all the while these policies would be presented as unavoidable cost-cutting measures to keep up appearances.
Even the fears about the economy and government spending are bullshit. Notice the folks obsessing over birthrates always quote the retiree to worker ratio. They don’t talk about the dependent to worker ratio, and that’s what really matters. Yes, our populations are aging, and yes that means relatively more old people to take care of. But we in turn also have far fewer children to take care of. If we can adapt to the Baby Boom era, we can adapt to an aging population.
Further afield, fears about human extinction are total bullshit. No country is a monolith; every nation has groups within it with higher and lower relative birth rates. If the birth rate stays low and never recovers among the mainstream society, eventually the smaller groups end up composing most of the population, and then the birth rate recovers. The Amish inherit the Earth.
Or, if even that fails, ultimately technology loss alone stabilizes your birthrates. Eventually your population falls so low that you just can’t physically manufacture reliable birth control anymore. That’s a product of industrial production. It requires a certain minimum population size to run a factory. Below that and we just regress to earlier technological eras. Eventually we end up back in a mostly agrarian state, and suddenly having kids is once again economically beneficial.
increase wages
Hahahaha oh. That’s cute.
If theres a shortage in the labor market, you either fill it with slavery or raise wages.
Americans track record seems to indicate the former waaayyyy before the latter
Raising wages fucks the people trying to retire because their stock holdings lose value. It’ll have to be slavery if you want to continue having retirement as a thing. Ideally colonialism + slavery, just import slaves from countries still experiencing population growth, such as many African ones…
Wait I think something about this idea might be problematic
If you can’t afford to tip, you can’t afford to eat out. Maybe you should get a second job that pays $2ph
Okay, but retirement is based off there being more people working than not, so in countries with national pensions we’ll have to significantly raise taxes, and in countries without such a system, retirees who are invested into index funds, need publicly traded corporations to start underpaying their employees even more (it’s really eye-opening when you realize people over 55 own 73% of all the resources of the US, from money to stocks to real estate).
Sounds to me like we’ll have to do a communism, i.e banding together to help each other out more, to allow people to retire in comfort. The horror!
(Just in case it seems like I’m dismissing anything you said, I’m not, and thank you for your analysis. My main takeaway is that it seems an unavoidable problem)
This is not about communism vs capitalism, its about the ratios. If there are 5 old people for every young person then how are we supposed to take care of all the old people? There’s just not enough manpower.
No, it’s about the scale of society and how we support ourselves in retirement, though. See, if retirement funds rely on, as the guy above me says 1. Companies underpaying their employees and 2. Governments taxing a group of more people in the below generations than there are to support in the top - then those are unsustainable sources of retirement comfort.
So what would be sustainable? Well historically, and in some countries today, old people need family to support them into old age. You would need either your own kid, with their own house big enough for you, or a rich little nephew with a house big enough for all you and your siblings to live in while retired.
Or… We just do the decent thing and take care of non-relatives. To ease the load on, say, retirement homes, we’d need to agree across society to bring the old people into communities of younger adults, and those younger adults would need to check on them regularly.
Sice this requires a community binding together, you might call it “communism.” Though it isn’t necessarily Marxism.
We should be in a situation where people need to take in like 5 non-relative old people into their homes and provide them constant care (which they cannot do if they are at work). It’s not sustainable no matter your economic system.
Why do you care about the ratio of workers to old people? What matters is the ratio of dependents to workers. We have more retirees, but we also have fewer children. This isn’t that hard. If we could manage the Baby Boom of the 50s, we can manage this.
What matters even more is total productivity per citizen. It does not matter if a house is built by 20 builders with shovels or 5 builders with excavators. What matters is the house being built. And productivity per worker has massively risen and is, in my opinion, going to rise further.
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That’s an interesting point but I’m not sure if the numbers really add up. As I understand it, the number of dependents will be greater from population decline (primarily due to an aging population) than it was during the baby boom
How do nursing homes do it?
Poorly is my understanding
Also the ratio is a lot higher in nursing homes. Yes you might have a ratio of x nurses to y old people, but you also need to consider the people indirectly contributing. Like the trades people who built the building, or the people who pay for the care through taxes or otherwise, the people working to route electricity, the pharmacists making all those medications that the old people need, etc.
Also, we need people to do jobs other than working in nursing homes. We can’t have all our workforce caring for the elderly.
Actually it is a communism vs capitalism thing. The problem arises in both, but the solutions available depend on the system. I reccomend you look up how China is handling its massive elderly population. For example the elderly there have huge public parks and get outside moving and socializing a lot. In big cities it’s common for them to have mid day slow dance meetings in the parks. This is only possible because the government’s priority is not producing profit for billionaires but caring for its people. So it maintains these things and the public transport required to get the elderly there, and the assistance to keep them fed and healthy.
This video is 15 years old: https://youtu.be/SvmV7GRRPq0
When people stay active and a part of their community into their old age instead of sitting in their huge houses alone or in a nursing home they require much less support to keep living.
Username checks out… I am not particularly happy about many of the things china does, and I don’t think “but they are not the US” is an excuse for authoritarianism and imperialism, they got a way better culture of how to deal with old people than the west, both in traditions and in institutions.
If I had praised the the EU for their open border policy and talked about how freedom of movement has had multiple positive impacts on the nations in it would you have felt the need to jump in and be angry and start bringing up french neo-colonialism in west africa, and german munitions support for israel, and their mistreatment of immigrants/rising far-right movements? I don’t think you would have. Maybe you should do a bit of introspection and try to figure out why seeing China mentioned in a positive light causes you to have such a reaction?
If you notice also, critiquing them here was done using specific examples. Not vague terminology with no concrete real world example of what you mean. I genuinely do not know what imperialism you are talking about in regards to China the only guess I can make is that sometimes people call the BRI imperialistic, which I think is a bit silly. And as for authoritarian it’s a useless term. Yes, China has laws. These laws restrict what people can do there. That is Authoritarian. Yet so do all nations. You do not disagree with their use of authority. You disagree with how they use it.
Another great vid: https://youtu.be/RnCCY2YtVX0
Immigration!
Oh…
Population decline is a global phenomenon. You can’t offset this loss with immigration when the countries people are coming from are also experiencing a population decline. We (in the West) are currently using immigration to offset this loss now, but when the population decline really starts hitting other parts of the globe (as it is projected to do within the next few decades) then that will no longer be a solution.
And this is compounded by people living much longer…
Oh no not rich people having less money.
Hogwash. You forgot the other half of the equation. We don’t have as many children to support. Notice how people obsessed over birth rate always focus on the retiree:worker ratio rather than the dependent:worker ratio? The problem disappears once you realize we can simply take money that we were spending on childcare and shift it to eldercare.
Children live with parents. If retirement becomes burden of your offspring this will have interesting consequences.
Re resource shift: in my country we managed to increase total employment in education while birthrates continue to dwindle
isn’t that specifically the government pentions? social security and somewhat less important to those that have personal retirement accounts?
Considering how people struggle with the comparatively small hiccup that is the current Iran-US war, I find it hard to believe that all commenters here would be fine when global trade dwindles.
I however am built different and would simply survive economic and societal collapse.
If society is constantly getting richer every single year and has for decades… Why are people still struggling? Either poor people are unreasonable/irrational, we don’t actually care about reducing cost of basic necessities,or the wealth increases are being siphoned out elsewhere.
Population decline would be a non-issue in a functioning economy, because a small shrinkage of the economy would be a non-issue.
I always hate it when someone says that we would need to reduce our standard of living to remain sustainable. It’s 100% bullshit predicted on using a definition of “standard of living” that nobody understands (roughly speaking I think it’s only used to compare two different persons or groups in an idealized snapshot in time). We waste so much food. Some of it’s necessary, but, 40%??
yes! If there wasn’t so much overconsumption by a small set of very rich folks everyone could live a comfortable life sustainably, it’s so frustrating
Society is going to collapse anyway, the question is, how hard and how badly. The whole idea behind “not sustainable” is that it is not possible to sustain something. I personally rather hit the brakes than accelerate before hitting the wall.
The whole idea behind “not sustainable” is that it is not possible to sustain something.
-1 That is not “the idea!”, that is the definition. A recursive one at that.
-2 That doesn’t really follow from either your or OPs comments. What is not sustainable? The economy, society, global trade? Did you delete a sentence?I think your comment makes more sense if I was arguing for people to counteract population decline. I am not. I was simply pointing out that it won’t be sunshine and rainbows as OP and many commenters here seem to believe.
