Half my life was spent fearing the result of limitless population growth and contemplating the inevitability of war and famine to shock population levels back down to sustainable levels. They warned us about this starting at least as far back as the sixties.
I see organic population collapse as a categorically good thing.
Long-term, possibly. But if the collapse happens too quickly it may cause a lot of issues. A slow steady decline would be best but may be difficult to achieve.
The oligarchy is welcome to not poison people.
That’s why I tell hard-right folks that childless homosexuality is the cornerstone of God’s plan to save humanity
The world needs more babies.
Does it?
Or do we just need to embrace migrants?
“A reduction in the share of workers can lead to labor shortages, which may raise the bargaining power of employees and lift wages — all of which is ultimately inflationary,” Simona Paravani-Mellinghoff, managing director at BlackRock, wrote in an analysis last year.
“Have babies,” said the billionaire, “or else who am I going to exploit in the future?”
The problem with capitalism, is eventually you run out of other people’s labor
It is a basic math problem… they keep raising housing prices ain’t nobody going to have kids when 1500 in rent is due monthly
$1500 a month? I wish!
Less people means less stress on the environment though.
And more houses, and more job opportunities.
We’ll be…the new people will be fine!
Many Boomers voted their progeny away when they put Reagan in office.
How is this a fertility issue? Are people unable to have children, or just unwilling?
I think the consensus is that it’s mostly as a result of women having greater reproductive choices, greater access to family planning services, and more women choosing to delay having children or choosing to not have children at all, often so they can instead focus on a career.
Edit: I want to point out that what I’m describing is the consensus, as I understand it, of mainstream experts in the US. However, I believe there is evidence that this consensus opinion is not entirely accurate. If I’m not mistaken, surveys indicate that there are a fair number of people who would like to have children but are not because the right circumstances are not present for them to feel secure enough to have children. Many of the people who are not having children would have them if they felt more financially, romantically, and/or emotionally secure. Therefore, it’s possible that it’s not so much that people are choosing not to have children as it is that the necessary conditions for making people feel secure enough to have children are not present for a large number of people.
often so they can instead focus on a career.
Corpo speak people are broke… I expect better here
Vast majority of people don’t have “careers”
Whatever that clown term even means.
We work for money lol
That’s more than a bit insulting to the women of the world choosing to work instead of have kids. Sure, some of them are forced to because they wouldn’t have enough money to live without a job. And many of the jobs these women have chosen aren’t necessarily long term careers.
But it’s condescending and insulting to say those women have no other contributions to the world outside of working a menial day job and would rather stay at home having kids if only they could afford it. Calling a career a clown term is so edgy and cool of you! As if there aren’t people out there who absolutely love what they do for a living and aren’t happily working for crap pay just to do what they love. All of the adult women I know who have chosen not to have kids have really good careers, and all but one have a great salary.
And to your point that the vast majority of people don’t have “careers,” sometimes an entry level position that is just a day job and not really a career can lead to a bigger career. My mom started as a secretary at a small company and showed she knew how to do the job of her boss, so she got his job when he left. Then she ended up starting her own business in that field, which absolutely flourished and became the thing she did for the next 30 years.
“Corpo speak…” you are such a tool.
I personally felt like it was a reference to the complete lack of corporate loyalty to it’s employees.
It’s hard to have a “career” in the classical sense the way my 90 year old grandparents did.
You can still choose a field of work and if you’re lucky you’ll get to stay in it for most of your adult life, but between outsourcing in IT, fields being made redundant as technology advances/changes (from cashiers and retail to journalism and marketing, accounting, and phone work) and whole fields of manufacturing work getting shipped overseas, the number of lifelong fields of work available is rapidly shrinking, facing fierce competition for jobs, and becoming a moving playing field faster than most people can retrain for.
“HR” jobs could get halved or more with chatbots providing benefits and payroll adjustment information. “Big data” is doing most of the “market research” that advertisers handled manually 30 years ago.
Big money is still trying to sell us the “career” dream because it leads to the school loan debt they feed off of and temporarily gluts fields with workers to reduce salaries, but only a few handfuls of fields of work really have “career” style options anymore.
I took it not as an insult to the people trying to have one, but as disdain and disgust at how the word gets bandied about like so much bait on a hook when the reality is fastly becoming far different for the 20- and 30- somethings of today.
That might be just me being both charitable and jaded, though.
There are more people in the world than ever before and we have folks writing news stories telling us there’s a crisis building and that we need to have more kids?
They’re farming us like ranch animals.
Infinite growth requires infinite bodies to feed it.
I think our planet would be described as a free-range human labour farm, to anyone who was able to view it independently. Well, lots of it not so free-range. Its why they’re coming for reproductive freedom. They’re doing for the same reason a beef farmer wouldn’t give their cows reproductive freedom.
Look at long term trends, population is already dropping in East Asia and Europe
Sure, there might be more people in Nigeria, but they are not paying into your retirement
Yeah maybe this way of handling retirement doesn’t work? It’s clearly a pyramid scheme.
Obviously, but how do you fix it without getting more workers? No scheme would work without people doing work.
Society needs farmers and doctors. Like it or not, everything else is optional.
Where are you going to get new doctors if everyone in your society is 70 years old
Nurses are now optional? EMTs? Firefighters? Military personnel? Police?
I’m talking about necessary for the species to carry on existing. And yes I grew up in a place with no police, no military, no EMTs, no firefighters. We had a nurse though. If someone did something that would normally involve the police, it was settled by the parties involved. (If you got drunk and drove through someone’s fence, they’d show you up at your house with a roll of barbed wire and some fence posts and you’d have to fix it. Possibly also round up any escaped sheep)
Enjoy being conquered by another country if you don’t have a military. Sure, the species will survive, but you may not
Is this fair?
Is this sane?
"A reduction in the share of workers can lead to labor shortages, which may raise the bargaining power of employees and lift wages — all of which is ultimately inflationary,” Simona Paravani-Mellinghoff, managing director at BlackRock, wrote in an analysis last year.
And while net immigration has helped offset demographic problems facing rich countries in the past, the shrinking population is now a global phenomenon. “This is critical because it implies advanced economies may start to struggle to ‘import’ labour from such places either via migration or sourcing goods,” wrote Paravani-Mellinghoff.
This is just mask-off capitalism. They want people to have a lot of babies, and/or large numbers of poor and desperate people migrating into the country, so that they have a constant, reliable source of cheap labor.
You know what slows down inflation? An upper limit on the cost of goods. But hey im just a filthy commie.
It didn’t, not in the US, not in Soviet Union
In the Soviet Union it caused rationing instead. Here’s your coupon for 1 stick of butter
Sure buddy those are the only two countries that have existed in the world. So can’t work anywhere.
It doesn’t work because it’s a stupid idea.
If there’s a cap on the price of a type of good, then obviously only the lowest quality things get made. If you cap shoes to $10, they will only sell shoes imported from sweatshops.
If you specify exactly how something is made, like $20 for made in USA shoes, they will import it from a sweatshop and sew a logo on it in the US.
If you specify how much labor must be done in the US, there’s a chance nobody would bother since selling the $10 sweatshop shoe has better profit margins
Yeah thats not how the prices are set tho so your entire premise and basis is stupid. Have a good day. Do some reading.
What country would you point to as a success for this policy?
Can i have your list of valid countries to choose from so that my answer doesn’t get disqualified for picking a third world country.
a maximum retail price exists for most if not all goods in India. And it helps slow down inflation.
India would be perfectly valid if it wasn’t experiencing high inflation just like everyone else. Which it is.
https://finimize.com/content/rbi-chief-urges-india-to-cut-inflation-despite-strong-growth
You can’t fix inflation just by setting a max price. It leads to shortages or (more common in India’s case) retailers finding loopholes:
Didn’t say it solves inflation. You cant stop a global phenomenon happening. You can ease it.
Sounds awesome. Bring it on. Less people is better fuck the infinite growth economy
The problems listed in the article are real. we’ve built a system:
- Where a lot of economic growth stems from an increasing supply of (cheap) labour
- That relies on people of working age being able to financially support a retiree class.
Both of these are going to fall apart if the population stops growing. The smaller group of working age people won’t be enough to support the amount of retirees, and without population growth there’s no economic growth.
It’s sad that economists correctly see all this coming but then conclude that the only solution is “make more babies.” It’s short term thinking almost by definition, because in the limit it’s rather obvious that at some point we will not have the resources to support any more people. And the closer we get to that limit the less each individual person will have (even worse when wealth is not equally distributed).
Unfortunately I don’t see any economist putting forth a plan that accepts population decline and alters the system to account for it. It wouldn’t be easy but it seems no one is even trying.
There’s no economic reason the nominal GDP of any country or the world in general has to continuously increase. The important metric is per capita production. As long as people get continuously more productive through innovation, standards of living will continue to increase.
At the national level, vying for long term economic power in the world, a higher and younger population is going to be a huge advantage very soon and countries should be trying to get as many immigrants in their borders as they can. But instead they are…going a different direction.
You say that, but when I’m more productive I’m inevitably much less happy. Work sucks.
Does anybody think about the fact that every year on average 9-10 million people die every year from starvation and malnutrition related deaths. The vast majority of these numbers are children under 5 years old. The 9-10 million number was pre-covid. There was an uptick due to the supply chain issues. I think I read an article saying the number for 2021 was around 14 million. Again, mostly children.
It’s mostly kids in 3rd world Africa, middle east, India, etc.
We over here need to have more kids though. Because profits.
Idk I just think all this is dumb. Fuck capitalism and the system we have. It’s all fucked.
That means the supply of workers in many countries is quickly diminishing.
I thought AI was going to take our jobs.
Of course it is! We are simultaneously facing a labor shortage and mass unemployment. The important thing is to keep being angry and frightened, the specific subject you’re angry about at any given time is flexible.
You can have both a labor shortage and mass unemployment. It occurs when workers are skilled for an industry with decreasing or no demand while another industry that requires different skills has increasing demand.
A good example of this is the high demand in the US for so called “Blue Collar” jobs. We have a shortage of trades people (Electricians, Plumbers, HVAC, etc) and far too many Business and Marketing people. There’s 100,000 MBA’s out there looking for a job and there’s 100,000 Plumbing Contractors trying to hire someone.
In a world with too many humans already, can you imagine painting a drop in the birth rate as somehow a bad thing?
lol
I don’t really care about its impact on the economy, but I do feel for those who are attempting to have a child to no avail. I can only imagine how soul crushing that process can be.
“Fertility crisis” in the headline doesn’t refer to anyone’s inability to have children. It refers to the fertility rate, which is just statistics about how many kids are popping out.
The problem is the average age increases, and you’ll have more of an elderly population, meaning barely any people actually working while a ton of people are on pensions
That’s why I’m living now, not waiting for retirement. I got a good 15 years left, maybe 20 if I push it. Then I’m tapping out. Not a fan of keeping on living just for the sake of breathing.
