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 workers 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.
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 workers 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.
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.
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.