While I understand the reason why a demographic dropout would be a catastrophe, I fucking hate how they say it’s our fault, when they were the ones who fucked up everything in the first place
There’s been a rash of people like Elon Musk posting rants about “declining birth rates in the developing world” (and sometimes dog whistling while at it) - getting upset that contrary to the worries of Malthus and Ehrlich, it turns out humans are not the same as bacteria in a petri dish just exponentially reproducing until they exhaust all the carrying capacity of their environment. Instead, it seems that those of us that are in paradigms where we have relatively high per capita energy and materials consumption, respond to economic, cultural and environmental stimuli, and slow our roll once we feel we are at an “x” threshold of population density and environmental & economic stress.
Given that we live on a finite planet with finite resources this small bit of self control might just be what saves humanity from a truly dystopian future.
What the demographic shift of less younger workers versus more retiring seniors does mean is that our systems of depending on constant growth of consumption for our faith in our currency and financial institutions, and for providing for government guaranteed retirement funding, both end up under threat - but those issues could still be easily fixed simply by allowing more immigration from the multitude of places on this globe that still have relatively high birth rates, that have plenty of people with strong work ethics seeking greater opportunities.
allowing more immigration from the multitude of places on this globe
But then the immigrants will take all the jobs and also not work and take all the money from citizens.
Do you even FOX bro?
Okay I’m gonna play devil’s advocate, it’s worrying because we are not adapting our system.
I’ve always thought over population is a big issue but when I found out how our social security is intentionally a Ponzi scheme, it made me very worried.
I don’t give two shits about the replacement theory but I’m worried that I am getting paid shit throughout my adult life since labour isn’t expensive yet but
whenif I need to retire, labour could become super expensive.Of course a sane society would just use all the excess wealth today to invest in automation but if we were sane, a lot of things would be better.
For real, if right wingers are so hell bent on burning the world down, then I’ma make sure the future of humanity isn’t my problem.
If things get bad enough I’ve got three bullets, in case two don’t work.
Yup. I’m just one private citizen. The replacement ratio of my country’s population is not my responsibility. 🤷♂️
Republicans will simply declare that child birth is the patriotic duty of every American woman of healthy reproductive capacity. Men will be drafted to war. Women will be drafted into childbirth via forced artificial insemination. Legally speaking, if a man can be drafted to give up his life and sacrifice his body “for the greater good of the nation,” there’s little reason that a woman couldn’t be drafted for forced birth. If your government can force you to die for your country, your government can force you to give birth for your country.
You think it’s gonna be forced artificial insemination in that scenario? It’s absolutely going to go back to the times where women have to marry bc they’re not allowed to own anything (land, bank account, their own bodies) and marital rape won’t be considered real bc husband’s own their wives. Of course, this is if the fascists get their way. Given how the left has been rising up and voting in actual leftists/socialists in the primaries these last few months, the fascists are going to have actual opposition rather than just controlled opposition corpo dems
It’s not that they’re afraid of society collapsing. They clearly don’t care about that, as most of what they do ignores that.
What they’re worried about is the “Great Replacement”, where white people become a minority. If that wasn’t what they were really afraid of, then they would consider the problem of declining birth rates to be easily solvable with immigration.
I mean, declining birth rates still cause problems. Even if you’re sane and don’t give a shit about shifting racial demographics.
Shits gonna be really rough for my generation when we’re too old to take care of ourselves, while also outnumbering the young people.
I hear this all the time, and it seems to ignore the glaring elephant in the room. When talking about whether you can keep an economic system going, what matters is not the ratio of workeres to retirees, but the ratio of workers to dependents. Yes, we have more old people for each worker, but we also have fewer children. We can simply shift resources from child care to elder care. You manufacture more adult diapers and fewer infant diapers. More nurses go into gerentology than neonatal care. You shift government funding from elementary schools to pensions. More women can stay in the workforce, because fewer of us are having children. And those that do are having fewer of them.
We know that economies can adapt to rapidly growing populations. We’ve survived baby booms just fine. After WW2, in the US, we suddenly had to care for far more children than our system was ever built to handle. Yet we managed to muddle through it. If we can adapt to a baby boom, we can adapt to a slowly aging population. Capitalism, for all its flaws, does have some benefits. And one of those is that it’s pretty efficient at reallocating resources based on changing demand.
And honestly, there are some real upsides to declining population. We can ease our impact on the environment. The real cost of housing will decline. Scarcer workers will see their wages rise. This is the real reason the billionaires are so afraid of a declining population. They need millions of desperate people struggling just to scrape by. Do you think Amazon could run its hellish warehouses the way it does if the cost of housing was half what it currently is?
That all assumes people will not be living longer in the future.
The real cost of housing will decline.
Children generally live with their parents. We’d have to all start living with our elderly parents for it to be the same in terms of housing costs.
This is the real reason the billionaires are so afraid of a declining population. They need millions of desperate people struggling just to scrape by. Do you think Amazon could run its hellish warehouses the way it does if the cost of housing was half what it currently is?
You shouldn’t assume billionaires are that intelligent. A huge amount of money has been invested into AI on the promise that it will take away people’s jobs. billionaires are emotionally driven idiots. They learned from Jack Welch that if you cut jobs, line goes up. Therefore if you cut half of all the jobs, line goes up big. They’re small minded people that don’t think in terms of how the economy functions, they only care about their businesses.
If it were the case billionaires had some over arching plan for the economy, then Jeff Bezos would be thinking that if everyone were more prosperous, people would be buying more stuff from Amazon, wouldn’t he?
They just want a bigger percentage of the pie, they don’t care if the entire pie is smaller and in absolute terms a smaller percent of a bigger pie is more than a larger percent of a smaller pie. Why would they? They already have more money than they could ever spend, so they’re obsessed with having more power than their competitors. Racking up a high score and gaining more power.
But your (our?) generation won’t outnumber young people if young people keep immigrating. Not that “keep foisting the burden of perpetual growth on the young” is ACTUALLY a good plan, but it’s exactly the kind of selfish arch-capitalist thinking that they’d be all in favor of if it was white young people.
It’s interesting because it’s obvious that the reason why people are having less children is because they can’t afford it and they don’t think it’s a good idea for the children.
However, rather than actually remedying this situation, the people who want us to have as many children as humanly possible so they have more workers are doing everything in their power to make life worse.
Spoiler alert: they’ll just ban contraception, abortion and sex ed instead
Meh, can’t have a baby in the mouth or the butt.
Jokes on them, I’m not having any sex.
Billionaires are looking forward to artificial wombs to create white babies they’ll own.
Hell, they had a private island filled with kidnapped little kids to rape.
I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re building another island filled with young, healthy, trafficked, white womb girls.
Alternatively they can assure more children by crashing the economy so hard people will be forced to have like 9 children so that there’s a chance that at least 2 of them can take care of their parents when they get old.
That’s how Trump decided to make America great again. It’s gonna be frontier lynchings, robber barons and slave trades all over again.
Make the US 3rd world again.
We are in a shitty pay to win permadeath coop mmorpg where the game balance has been totally broken by indivualistic whales. Of course no new players want to subscribe to this shit.
Don’t care, I’m not producing wage slaves.
yeah basically. im actually fine with my genetic line going out if the earth goes on with a vibrant biosphere as well.
The world is literally on fire due to climate change, numerous wars and conflicts with global repercussions, and everything is getting more expensive, while people see that politics - which is supposed to serve society - is subservient only to its masters in the business world. Overpopulation has also become an increasingly pressing issue. The outlook is bleak. Why on earth would anyone want to bring children into this real-life dystopia and deliberately subject them to this?!
20 years ago my wife and decided it was not going to happen and back then it was like. thinks don’t look like they are going well economically and with the environment and our personal finances just aren’t adding up. fast forward to now and best decision ever. It was debatable 20 years ago but now you have to be crazy.
Quite honestly, I doubt that has any bearing on it. Realistically speaking, it wasn’t that much better during the cold war, and that generation had kids. And climate change is not something most people plan their groceries around, let alone their future family.
Because the alternative is just letting your gene line or even the whole species die? Theres also some people that still believe, and probably can succeed, that they can raise kids resilient enough to face those challenges and brave enough to tackle them. If in 40 years governments finally wanna do something about climate change, they’re gonna need some younger hands and boots on the ground to get it done.
Not all of us were raised in a decent life. There are people who grew up in war, slavery, and all sorts of worse shit. They eventually escaped and made a decent life for themselves. Why wouldn’t they believe their children could do the same?
Reality check. We are in ZERO danger of extinction. Our population could decline by 95%, and there would still be more humans alive than when Julius Caesar walked the Earth. Extinction would take millennia. But even then, there are built in safe guards that make declining below a certain population level impossible.
For a start, consider natural selection. societies are not homogeneous. Some groups reproduce at above replacement, some below. In the US for example, if we just assume birth rates remain the same for all groups indefinitely, never returning to an average replacement rate? In that unlikely scenario, extinction still will not happen. The Amish and the Mormons shall inherit the Earth.
And this can happen for cultural practices, not just religious groups. Maybe multi-generational households will become more common through natural selection. Maybe it will become the norm for people to have children right after high school, while still living with their parents. You only go to college and start your career after having some kids. Each generation pays to raise their own grandchildren, rather than their own children.
And even without cultural selection, eventually technological decline will prevent extinction. What technology your society can wield is a function of its population. As your population shrinks, your society’s technological complexity decreases. Eventually you can no longer manufacture mechanized farming equipment, so more people have to work the land again. And on traditional family farms, children are an economic resource that pay for themselves. So the birth rate recovers. And of course, reliable birth control is the product of industrial production. Eventually your population shrinks enough that you are no longer capable of running a birth control factory.
I don’t want to see the country become entirely Amish or to see us collapse back to 18th century levels of technology. But these are just the worst case scenarios. The absolute worse case scenario is that population declines by 90-95% and we regress technologically to some 18th century equivalent. Not a future I want to see, but it would hardly be the end of the world. Our present industrial civilization would be remembered as an unsustainable historical aberration, a temporary population boom brought on by the era of cheap hydrocarbons.
I do see your points about the resilience, but to assume total population collapse is IMPOSSIBLE is wrong. Many species on this planet have become extinct and we are not immune to that, locally nor globally. The amish may struggle when crop failure and extreme weather becomes more common place due to changing climates or pollution levels. They might make a bad year or two, but several bad years in a row could significantly reduce populations, possibly to the point of poor genetic diversity where after a few generations certain diseases or conditions wipe them out. They could also just be murdered by hungry stragglers of modern society armed with assault rifles that take their farms without knowing how to sustainably run them.
And also those amish will still have to be having kids despite how bleak their future looks which was the ultimate point of my comment. No kids = no humanity.
We already know from millennia of history that the human population can be maintained just fine at pre-industrial technology and population levels. Sure crop failures happened, but they don’t happen everywhere at the same time. Famines were historically very localized things.
And if we’re talking complete climate collapse? In that scenario, everything goes out the window. If that’s the scenario you want to plan for, then we should be doing everything we can to shrink our numbers as fast as humanly possible.
Humans are by far the most resilient species on this planet. We’ve learned to live everywhere from burning arid deserts to frozen arctic wastes. We will be the last species on this planet aside from some bacteria that go extinct.
We literally cannot be the last species aside from bacteria to go extinct because we eat other species. We rely on plants and often animals to provide our nutrition. We rely on pollinators for plants to grow fruits and vegetables. We were able to survive those harsh environments because they could provide for us. There is no living in the artic without the seals for example.
This is also the fastest our climate has ever changed. Yes the climate has changed in the past but never ar the rate it is now which could cause widespread species collapse, likely becoming earth’s largest extinction event to date. We have no idea the extents that current climate changes impacts will have on us in 100 years, let alone the fact its still getting worse as there is a significant lag time in terms of the effects.
Sure. But again, if you’re planning for climate collapse, it’s a complete uncertainty. Really the only thing that we can do now that would reliably increase our chances of survival is to shrink our current population peacefully as rapidly as possible. If you’re worried about climate collapse, you should be dancing with joy at a declining population. Fewer people means fewer emissions and less land taken up by human activities.
We are already in an extinction event. Its not so much about if collapse but more about when and how much.
Yes, just let the gene line die who cares we’re not that special, humanity won’t mourn our loss. That’s all part of the brainwashing, like you have to have kids because your parents and grandparents did? Of course not, live life as you see fit doesn’t matter that your ancestors chose what was best for them.
Thinking ones genes are so irreplacable is so incredibly narcissistic. Like, the world couldn’t possibly become a great place without specifically MY genes.
My genes don’t fucking matter.
Found Elon’s account
This is a good point. A lot of it to me is one experiencing an advanced level of human progression and relative peace and two seeing the awefulness that some people put up with and three seeing the massive widening of wealth disparity. If it was a situation where we just had the environmental challenges but society had progressed to a more equitable situation I could see it but then our environmental challenges would not be as great as they are. In addition if we were in a state where we had stabilized our population and was working to degrow to a level that was sustainable long term. Then it would make sense.
In 40 years, correcting course will be even harder than it is today. Climate change is a compounding problem. Once the ice sheets are gone, they’re not coming back in any time scale we can imagine.
raise kids resilient enough to face those challenges and brave enough to tackle them.
Just kicking the can down the road, like the generations before us. I’m imagining the Lion King scene, except instead of showing Simba a bountiful wilderness to inherent, it’s a scene full of trash under a burning sky.
“Everything the light touches will be yours to fix. Good luck.”
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My assumption is if you’re rasing kids to take on those challeneges, you aren’t one of the can kickers. Global problems take near global effort. Its not like “well son we tried nothing and now its on you.” Its more like “here son become educated on whats happening, these are the things we’ve done individually to try to make a change and have a more sustainable mindset, now grab that brick and your picket sign theres a protest this morning.”
Again the alternative is just giving up.
I’ll be raising my kids on The Anarchist’s Cook Book for this reason.
Declining birth rates and house prices dropping are both things the media love to make out are terrible things.
And they just aren’t.
I suppose house prices dropping are pretty terrible if you see your house only as an investment, instead of a roof over your head. I know people who would be fucked in their retirement if they house price falls, because they’ve gambled on their house price climbing enough to carry them through retirement.
I hope they get hurt though. Treating housing as an investment that needs to turn a profit, while people are living on the streets is fucking insane.
The rich already decided they don’t want to prevent this, they’d rather just replace everyone underneath them. That’s why the AI bubble just won’t pop even though its a blackhole for money
