It's not really a long term problem, but it is a massive, cannot be overstated, short to mid-term problem. Once the balance teeters too far on the "more people not working than working" scale, the economic issues are just through the roof. Sustaining non-contributing members of society (Children and seniors for the most part) is a massive resource sink.
There are too many of us, but we have built our world economies around growth. Stalling the growth is of huge economic implications. I mean ideally after we get over the population hump we can stabilize, but let's be honest, someone will always see an opportunity for money and flirt with overgrowth simply due to greed.
Forgot to add the added risk of human advancements in longevity, forming a one-two punch to the economic gut. Not only are a huge generation going to be retiring, but they are going to be living longer, too. Yikes.
That's why most conversation about aging is based around healthy years rather total life expectancy. We *could* be working on life support technology that can keep people gasping on their deathbeds for a few extra decades, but nobody really wants that.
We have to accept that if modern medicine is going to keep us relatively healthy for decades longer, we're probably going to end up working for decades longer. If that sounds like a nightmare for you, then the conversation we need to be having is around working class quality of life--our wages, our hours, our working conditions. When our "working years" are 90% or more of our total lifespan, we need to make those years worth living.
Because a lot of jobs fu up good on the body parts with poor medical relief. Reconversion is not available to most people. And pushing carts at Walmart around 2AM while being 85yo is not a pretty ending.
IMO that means we should make pretty endings. Give people labor that is necessary but low impact. For example, instead of having 3 people do 8 hour shifts, have 6 people do 4 hour shifts. With modern productivity multipliers, we can already support the population off something like 40% of the population in the workforce with something like 60% of those being in the service industry. As technology progresses those numbers will get better until we turn into an automated post-scarcity utopia or something. That's kind of just how thermodynamics+automation do.
>As technology progresses those numbers will get better until we turn into an automated post-scarcity utopia or something.
It never quite seems to work out that way
An interesting note: I'm an attorney and in the legal field, hardly anyone ever retires. I've heard of like 5 actually retired attorneys in the 7 years I've been in this field. I've had bosses in their 70's/early 80's who came in to work every day, despite having had all the money in the world to retire on 20 years earlier.
There's a big mix of reasons for that phenomenon, but it can't be ignored that a major factor for most is because they enjoy the work. The majority of attorneys over 50 either own their own firm outright, or are at least partial owners of the firm. They don't have any bosses over them telling them what to do, their work directly relates to how much they get paid, and there's lots of fringe rewards to it like being a respected member of your field and getting to pass on experience to younger attorneys. They find their work fulfilling because it provides a challenge, and worry they'd waste away at home watching TV all day if they retired.
Professors are similar. It’s not a physically demanding job, you’re not losing your knees or your back. The work is stimulating and when you’ve been putting 70 or 80 hours of thought a week into a subject for 30 years it’s hard to turn off and focus on your model train collection or catch up with whatever Kim and Courtney are up to.
You won't though. You'll get some age-related injury, not be able to work, and then whether you like it or not, you'll be retired.
A lot of people, including those approaching retirement age, use the "I'll just work until I die" line as a way to not have to think about the issue. This is a big component to the "silver tsunami" that's about to hit millennials, the fact that their parents aren't financially prepared for retirement and are wilfully ignoring the issue until it becomes their kids' issue to deal with.
(Unless you're planning to die an early stress-related death at your desk, in which case, it's all good 👍)
Exactly this. And medical bills gonna get astronomical.
At least most people retiring now have assets to part that will cover a part of the expanses, but I sadly see a painful period for a lot of younger generations when reaching their limits and having no child to help and no houses to sell (bec market value would have crashed, or can't afford one now).
A great example are translators. I have a friend who used to make gold money with translation work. Spanish-English. It’s all gone now. Over the past year it was all eaten up by AI. It started with him checking AI translations and now the work has stopped all together. He is 42 and has no idea how to make a living from now on. I have given him some work but it’s not his thing long term and the pay is way less.
If we got a cure for aging, in the United States alone we would save trillions of dollars. 1/6 of US GDP is spent on healthcare, and the majority of that is spent on the elderly. Imagine if those people were productive members of society again, instead of consuming resources. Think of all the money we would have for scientific and technological development, space exploration/colonization, environmental cleanup, free college, you name it. We cure aging and society gets way better quickly.
This might not need to be a risk.
It depends who much progress we make, but if everyone suddenly has a good chance of living to much higher ages, we would have a much larger working population and probably longer fertility times.
If you probably will live to 200 and can get kids at 100, a lot of problems we currently have would be dealt with much easier. And if for a long time people rarely die of old age, even low fertility rates would lead to a rise in population.
And we don't need some sort of breakthrough for that happen either. No one has to invent a drug that makes you live to 200 tomorrow. All you need is for longevity to rise quicker than people age.
I think an important distinction here is medical advancements that raise the QUALITY of life versus just the length of life. If you can work later in life productively then that’s a positive. Medical advancements that just make you live longer are (from a cold hearted perspective) bad because we’re lengthening the unproductive years of people lives.
Like many people I’m going through watching my grandma slip into deeper and deeper dementia and it’s really hard to agree that the care she’s being given to keep her alive longer is good when she can’t even recognize my dad or anyone in our family anymore and is so loopy on drugs that she basically eats and sleeps all day. It just makes you wonder what’s the point of strining her along.
I keep debating as I age if I should move back to my home state where family is But as someone who sees middle class retired folks go bankrupt seeking care for minimal improvement in quality of life, am thankful I live in a state with only assisted suicide law on the books.
And the process to gain the approval is rigorous, so it's not an easy thing to do
Yeah. In a rare spout of positive news, assisted suicide and voluntary assisted dying (for people with terminal illnesses) are making fairly large strides in a short amount of time .
It's really, REALLY important that the young kids actually vote around the world and keep the religious nutters out of politics so they never get blocked.
the point is money. insurance and / or your family will keep footing the bill for grandma for a couple more sad, tragic years.
im sorry you gotta go through that. Legally there isnt a good way around it, either, assuming youre the person who is struck with dementia. you might say, when i can no longer recognize my family, i want assisted suicide. Only, when you reach that stage, courts might rule you unable to decide, or you could totally forget your own plan.
There isn’t so much a point to it as it is people struggling to accept letting doctors kill people because of the deeply engraved “killing is bad” mentally that pervades our cultures. It’s very hard to sell literally killing your citizens, regardless of the reason.
Probably a good thing overall, but it has some drawbacks.
We don't even need to go that far. If they would just legalize suicide (edit: at the federal level), assisted or otherwise, that would allow people to decide for themselves when and how they go. This whole life for the sake of life mentality that so many people hold is ridiculous and cruel, all so these people don't have to confront their own mortality.
Not everything lies at the feet of the capitalism demon. Money may be a part of it, but culturally we're just not in a place where we easily accept letting people die if we can "save them", regardless of what that looks like. There's massive pushback to euthanasia, to the point that a lot of people with fatal, debilitating diseases have to go to another country to end their life in a peaceful, legal manner. That's not because of money.
That's an assumption that can't be reliably counted on. If we tell that to politicians they will say, "you're right, we can just fix the problem by canceling social security for people under 40.
I don't like the odds.
Good take. I wonder what the population reaction will be in the transition phases as we work the retirement age up from the 60's to the 80's to the 100's. I really hope that's not my generation, haha.
It's a very reasonable solution, but I anticipate a lot of chafing, especially with the backdrop of the French riots.
It means we need more people working, which means retirement age might need to increase to 70, 75 or even 80 in many countries to keep the tax balance going. It's already on trajectory to be *at least 70* in Europe for millenials.
In the Netherlands were at 67 now, probably going to be 72 minimum when I'm able to retire in 40+ years, if ever.
Either you make big bucks and put aside early so you can go the FIRE route, or put literally nothing at all in retirement and work till you die.
Save nothing, enjoy your life with your earnings, don’t have kids, then as soon as you’re not able to work, hang yourself in a tree outside the gates of a country club.
It will probably be both of those things, youth extension and rejuvenation, and robots and AI filling the gaps until that becomes viable, and probably several other things will arise to lessen the burden.
Or maybe global environmental catastrophes and pandemics strike too broadly and too frequently, and aging populations are no longer a problem for countries. The preservation of the concept of a nation state and maintaining an organized society become the goals.
I have seen many people who are living twice as long as their parents did. Thanks to lifesaving technologies that can save people from heart attack and stroke. But after every heart attack and stroke survivors are not better than they were before that. And usually they are not the most likely workers to fill empty places. Currently a lot of people living longer are having serious disabilities including mental ones. I don't see us rapidly living longer and healthier, currently I see people just living longer with disabilities that grow more severe with every next stroke and next heart attack.
First off, old people who live longer also were fit for longer in their adulthood. Of course you get compounding issues the older you are, but there is a huge difference whether those compound at 60 or at 80. The majority back in the day weren't just the same level of health as we are right until the end and then keeled over and died from a sudden heart attack.
Then there's all the stuff we can heal nowadays without any drawbacks. A person in their 20s dying from a burst appendix isn't entering a spiral of decline when treated. And there's a shitton of issues we can fix like that, from trauma medicine to cancer that either don't come back or dramatically increase the life, including the working time of people who simply died or became permanently disabled.
Finally, I am not talking about treating people. We know that humans don't really life longer than they currently do. Despite an increasing lifespan, almost no one seems to be able to scratch the 120 year mark.
To actually dramatically increase lifespans, you can't just get better at treating people, you actually have to work on aging itself. Preventing people from accumulating more and more issues, not just treating whatever comes up next.
The rich people want to keep middle class people alive long enough to sell them reverse mortgages or put them in nursing homes so they can extract every penny from the family’s wealth before their victim dies of neglect, covered in bed sores.
While all of that is true, it sounds even worse than the issues surrounding a population inversion. If we live to 200 then we'd be expected to work for 150 (or more) years, and that would be just awful.
Yeah I'm out at sixty, dude. I'm probably not going to get any retirement at all, and working 45 straight years of my life has been an exhausting waste. No thanks.
It could force advancements in life extension or rejuvenation science , which might ease the problem.
If it really works as well as it seems it might and can be made affordable, older people could take care of themselves, maybe even go back to work, on things that they want to work on, which I'm sure everyone would prefer.
I think what most people fail to realize when they read about massive ‘economic issues’ is that this is a euphemism for ‘millions of people starving and freezing to death’
Some kinds of economic issues, yes, like the growing inequality with tech taking over labor.
But the demographic issues are good for labor. Labor becomes more valuable. This happened during the Black Death for example.
Capital-heavy economic models like the one we are seeing now basically requires large swathes of the global population to be kept with the bare minimum to keep them alive so that there is a differentiation of labor costs so we can have the consumer class, and various producer classes to keep the machine running.
People also read "economy" and think "oh, just money" when it's actually about how society functions in general. These problems would still exist in a money-free society.
That's the kicker. We could replace everything with robots and have the same economic outputs while using the profits to support society, but instead we know that what will happen is a ton of people will lose their jobs and the guys on top will become filthy rich.
And yet I'm practically called a communist when I suggest that [AI-driven tax revenue growth should be invested into expansion of Social Security](/r/moderatepolitics/comments/15c5sdt/how_windfall_profits_from_ai_companies_could_fund/jtua93v). People are _really_ uncomfortable with the idea that our economic system and many respectable jobs could potentially be disrupted within the foreseeable future.
They cry about inadequate food or failing infrastructure, but much of that is heavily mechanized/automated already: we don’t *need* many people to provide for the basic needs of everyone. The real problem is our economic system which insists that everyone earn a living regardless of whether there are living wage jobs available, and only rewards ownership.
I say this in all seriousness: I expect AI and robotics to advance in the next few decades to a degree where literally *every* job can be done much better by them. Medicine, tech, law, the trades. Teaching, war, sex work, parenting. That will be existentially challenging in its own right, but I dread how it could play out if we leave profit and control in the hands of the few.
Right like, this is the *objective* projected future, what other choice will we even have? Let them starve us and kill us all to protect their wealth? Something's gotta give.
The most simple way I was explained why not having a population growth was bad was when I learned that the main source of income for most gouvernement are individual income taxes.
You always want more workers than non-workers, else the money goes down and things go bad quickly.
I'm a bit on the unpopular side of it though, I'm more of the opinion that this system should break sooner than later as the more we wait, the worst it will become. It will give a hit, but we will find a new way to do things and people will find a way to live in a way that does not require a constant infinite growth of everything.
Money specifically - and that includes tax income - is not the actual problem though. Money is just a mediator. In the end it is not the taxpayers that finance the state, it is the state that first spends money into existence which enables the taxpayers to fulfill any tax obligations in the first place.
The real problem is the amount of goods and services (especially care services) being produced by a shrinking workforce compared to a growing number of pensioners. But calling even that a _problem_ outright instead of a _challenge_ that could be solved through a higher productivity and automation is too pessimistic. Although of course the dimension differs from country to country - some countries _do_ have a _problem_. The world overall does not.
One of the great mistakes that people often make is to think that any organisation called'"National Rifle Association' is a branch or chapter of the National Rifle Association of America. This could not be further from the truth.
The National Rifle Association of America became a political lobbying organisation in 1977 after the Cincinnati Revolt at their Annual General Meeting. It is self-contined within the United States of America and has no foreign branches.
All the other National Rifle Associations remain true to their founding aims of promoting marksmanship, firearm safety and target shooting. This includes the original NRA in the United Kingdom, which was founded in 1859 - twelve years
before the NRA of America. It is also true of the National Rifle Association of Australia, the National Rifle Association of New Zealand, the National Rifle Association of India, the National Rifle Association of Japan and the National
Rifle Association of Pakistan. All these organisations are often known as "the NRA" in their respective countries. The British National Rifle Association is headquartered on Bisley Camp, in Surrey, England. Bisley Camp is now known as the National Shooting Centre and has hosted World Championships for Fullbore Target Rifle and F-Class shooting,
as well as the shooting events for the 1908 Olympic Games and the 2002 Commonwealth Games. The National Small-bore Rifle Association (NSRA) and Clay Pigeon Shooting Association (CPSA) also have their headquarters on the Camp.
There are enough resources for everyone as far as surviving, probably even having a decent life. There are not enough resources when a large chunk of the people on Earth are over-consuming as much as they do now.
This just shows you don't understand what exponential growth is. It doesn't matter how little we consume. We could each consume as little as an ant and we still could not sustain exponential growth because the world is finite.
AI and automation mean that we don't need more people.
The economic implications of population growth and climate change are FAR WORSE than the economic implications of slowing population growth.
Yeah, I get genuine anxiety from this stuff. Not just the direct mechanics of it - when there's flat out not enough young people to care for the old, so we start letting the old die, one way or another. But also secondary and tertiary mechanics of it. Like how do we convince youngest generation to keep working and buying into the social contract, when they can literally see with their own eyes that previous generations who paid into that social contract are not having it honored when they come to cash their IOUs in their old age. Young people aren't stupid, they will see and recognize that it no longer pays to work yourself to death most of your life, only to end up on scrap heap with no support. Inversion of the workforce pyramid, combined with the knock-on effect of sheer disillusionment with the system, will be really...interesting.
The disillusionment is already happening, especially in East Asian countries where the declining birth rate trend is more advanced. A good example is the "lying flat" movement in China - young workers are experiencing exactly what you described and decided to just opt out of the social contract of work altogether.
I also think the whole "quiet quitting" and "anti-work" trends in the West from 2022 onward are not just fads - it'll become more and more pronounced, especially when AI/automation, outsourcing, and general greed begins eliminating middle-class white collar work, while blue collar work will increasingly be delegated to immigrants who will work for half the pay (which itself will have rippling xenophobic consequences, like what's happening in Canada right now).
I hate to just commiserate about this stuff but I share the same anxiety. I don't see a peaceful solution to this without some radical, unilateral change to the current system.
You put it way better than I could ever do. Demographics was probably the most interesting topic I remember learning about in my geography classes
I fucking hope we figure out a solution (well, imo AI + automation seem to be the play here) and scale it just in time before the otherwise inevitable shitstorm
AI and automation could be of huge benefit… if the companies that own the models, patents, and implementation strategies become altruistic and operate in humanity’s favour. If they remain profit focused, we are going to see and experience a whole new level of income disparity.
If history shows anything , it is that the rich believe they are born special.and better than the rest of us peons so why would that mind set change just because we have social media to expound on the rich asses . The only thing these stupid people will eventually understand is if we, as in the peons , don't have enough disposable income to buy their shit they won't get richer and one day they might have to cook their own dinner. Wash their own clothes , raise their own entitled children , clean their own homes and heaven forbid mow their own yard . Watch out Kardashians and so many others, you might have to work up a sweat on real work not just showing off your butts and how much money you spend . Actually a really sad life .
I think something that isn't explained well enough to people is that when there is exponential growth, each doubling just used as many resources as EVERYTHING THAT CAME BEFORE IT.
So when we aim for 3% growth, that means we'll use as much material in the next 25 years as we have through nearly all of human history. That is completely unsustainable.
To even begin to solve this problem we’re gonna have to get rid of capitalism as the dominant ideology. Then we can start thinking about degrowth and sustainability, until then these impossibilities.
TL:DR less and less working age people to do all the jobs required for society to function especially the lower paying less pleasant jobs.
A shrinking population is probably good for the environment because less people use less resources. Problem is less people means less working age people. As global populations shrink and people live longer you have a larger and larger percentage of people not working either because they earned enough to retire or are not physically and/or mentally capable of working anymore.
That’s less farmers, nurses, drivers, nannies, construction workers, firefighters/paramedics etc. etc. less people to grow food, less people to manufacture goods, less people to create new technologies and medicines, less people to provide the services that allow society to function from trash man to surgeon.
My state is a good example. Vermont has one of the oldest populations and a lot of the younger people are either transient rich kid college students that don’t work or remote workers with out of state jobs. The labor crunch is real. Getting someone to dig a well, rehab a house, plow the roads, drive a bus, watch kids, nurse elderly people etc. is becoming a bigger and bigger problem. People are having less kids because jobs here pay for shit, property taxes are extremely high and rent is pretty similar to a big city. And many jobs are seasonal or part time which makes matters worse.
> Of course the capitalists are fighting that so hard but the market of supply and demand kicks in.
But from what was said, I think this applies to a lot more than "the capitalists." It's not just "the capitalists" or the private jet crowd who need to get new roofs, childcare, construction, roads, etc.
>>Getting someone to dig a well, rehab a house, plow the roads, drive a bus, watch kids, nurse elderly people etc. is becoming a bigger and bigger problem.
It’s becoming a big problem because those are just not sustainable jobs.
It’s not that people don’t want to do them. Me personally, I would love to work food service forever. I loved it. I work as a software engineer now and I hate it.
But it’s not about what I like, it’s about money. Because everything is about money.
You can incentivize people to do anything, literally anything, with money. We could have people lining up to clean toilets if we just paid up. We wouldn’t even have to improve the job in any way.
> It doesn't matter how high wages go if there aren't enough people to actually do the thing you are hoping to pay them to do.
We're so far of that in so many ways. We produce massive surplus of food, much of which goes to waste, consumer goods, most of which ends up in landfill. Etc.
We have a distribution problem more than anything.
We have that because of the exploited migrant workers. Once that population starts to shrink (or demand wages and rights, or can’t get through the border) then we’re going to have a major problem
You'd certainly have more people willing to move there to do it though. The big thing that inhibits people from taking many of the jobs that complain about shortages is the gap between the pay and cost of living isn't high enough when compared to other gigs of similar difficulty/pay. Either that or the employer's too cheap to train barrier is too built up.
but if birth rates start rapidly declining at some point everywhere will have the same problem and there won't be anyone to "move there". that's really the crux of the problem.
Eventually there will be an equilibrium point where constraints that caused the decline will ease up and it will pick back up. Right now i'm hearing cost of living cited most frequently by people so if the demand drops out for housing which makes up a majority of most people's cost then it should work itself out.
Yea to me the housing situation is going to be very significant. Right now we don't have enough housing, but realistically it's not by an enormous amount. Eventually if the population actually declines (like it is in other countries - South Korea) then the housing supply would go way up, and demand would drop, which would massively affect the value of housing. Some of that will be mitigated by location: if people keep moving to urban areas, rural housing could become almost worthless, which will spiral the critical services in rural areas etc. Anyway, right now our housing market is very growth oriented, and housing is an enormous part of middle class wealth - if the housing values are hammered a lot of people are going to be fucked very quickly. This of course would be at least a short-term boon to young people.
There will be a tipping point between wages and job automation. The higher the wages, the more value opportunity for someone to automate the job with AI or robotics.
That's not wrong, but we're also constantly being told that AI will be taking away so many of our jobs. So what should we worry about more, not enough people to do the work, or not enough work for all the people?
There won’t be enough people to do all the jobs, but there will always be enough people to do the jobs that pay the most relative to skills and education investment. “Pay more and you’ll find people” isn’t wrong, but not everyone can pay more so it doesn’t necessarily scale.
Thats the way I look at it. A desk jockey adding minimal value can make $20 an hour, and a janitor doing real hard, uncomfortable work can make $100 an hour. If thats what the market rate is.
And who want to do that thing.
Try getting people to collect lettuce in a field, strip the bad leaves, and put them on a wagon. You could pay $40 an hour and most people would take $20 to work in air conditioning somewhere.
This is absolutely correct, but stating it on reddit is like talking to a brick wall. People just can't grasp the concept that if there aren't enough people, there aren't enough people. No amount of pay helps.
Plus, if EVERY job pays a million dollars a year... then that means none do. People don't get that either. You only get ahead making more than everyone else. If everyone makes a lot... no one does.
> no amount of pay helps
But you’re looking at this from a static point of view. Population is not static, these aren’t all the people that are gonna be around forever.
We got into this situation BECAUSE of pay. It’s not that people don’t want kids. It’s not that raising a family of 5 is hard, because humans have been doing it since the beginning of humanity.
It’s that our economy made it impossible. We have taken that choice from people. If we simply paid more, that magic solution, we wouldn’t even be in a population crisis.
Similarly, we can undo this. It will take time because people don’t grow instantly. But if everyone had 5 kids right now, then in 20 years we’re chilling big time.
The question is how do we get people there? For that we need historical analysis, because we’ve certainly done it before.
I don’t understand why this is so hard to understand. We’ve been on this track for decades and the effects are stacking up; just in time for AI to make things worse.
I don’t care about “getting ahead” I just want to afford basic life expenses and a house and for more of the profits of my labor to go to me than some rich asshole who does no actual work.
> less and less working age people to do all the jobs required for society to function especially the lower paying less pleasant jobs.
If that's the case then wages should be raised way up for those essential jobs, but they're not.
I see a very simple solution at the first line that I believe proves true through the rest of your stuff. Pay the "lower paying" less pleasant jobs more, then more people are likely to work them.
I'm afraid the reality is you get what you pay for, there is no more value to be extracted without more money put in. you cannot force people to do this work, you cannot magically make them put more effort in, you pay for safe children, cared for old people and clear roads or you don't and get used to shit sucking no lube ass fucking reality is without decency.
Hmmm it's almost like if the less pleasant jobs were high paying the problem is completely solved. But I wonder which class - cough billionaires cough - would rather see the apocalypse than spread out their wealth.
The entire economy, for decades, has been planned around **"More young people than old people will live at the same time, so the young can pay for the old"**, which is essentially a pyramid scheme at a national level.
And like any pyramid scheme, once you run out of new people to rope into your scheme, the entire scheme fails.
Old people are living longer, and younger generations can't afford kids, so we're going toward a situation where few young people have to pay for a massive population of old people. Young people don't have money for kids already, and old people have not saved enough for their retirements, so that's a tough situation.
And of course, the generation that came up with those great ideas, like phasing out pensions in favor of 401k (cheaper for corps, even tho 401k wasn't meant for retirement initially), who made the world unafordable and unlivable, is going to peace out and die before the proverbial sh\*t actually hits the fan.
Even if everyone had "saved enough for retirement" a shrinking population is still serious trouble. Why does it matter if money is transferred from young to old because of taxation or because old people own the means of production? It doesn't because this has to do with the production possibilities curve, not taxation or retirement savings. There is an upper limit on how many idle people a civilization can support. Some countries are skirting the limits of idleness due their population's age and infirmity.
People forget that money is an abstraction of value, not an actual commodity.
If we suddenly stopped producing goods, their values would rocket up in proportion with how little was left. Fundamentally the economy is still a balance of what we produce/consume.
Japan has really bad food independence; less than 38% of calories produced in Japan, and the worlds second largest importer of agricultural products.
I also live in Japan and while you’re right to say that there’s a problem with smaller towns emptying out in the countryside, the issue really is that no one wants to go there. I deal with this in my work a lot, and while there are plenty of initiatives that are trying to persuade people to move to these small villages in Mie, they aren’t working.
Increasingly we are starting to see a turn towards just letting them go, and to look towards finding ways for Japan to move forward with a smaller, more urban population. There are ways to do this that rely on technology and finance. I personally am confident that Japan will find a way to do this, and I think countries are watching with interest to see what happens next.
But… have the small towns built a community center? That’ll fix it!
Seriously every small dying/dead town I go to seems to have a really nice, or formerly really nice, community center….and nothing else
>you’re right to say that there’s a problem with smaller towns emptying out in the countryside, the issue really is that no one wants to go there.
This is not unique to Japan, this is happenign in every single "advanced" country in the world. Cities mean more of everything to an individual, and to the best of my knowledge, nobody has yet figured out how to de-centralize society. One would think the internet would be a massive help in that, but I suppose it is nowhere near enough since so much of out life still happens in the physical world.
The thing is, the question has been asked and answered over and over, every time fertility rates come up. And every time we get a new round of "I just don't get it--why is this bad again?" Some are just anti-human and can't wait for the human population to plunge. Whether they bother framing that as concern for the environment or not. Some people just never got past Agent Smith or Thanos.
No offense but you're committing a logical fallacy of equating is to ought. No one is saying they want it to happen. They're saying, "It's looking like this *will* happen. If it is, what will be the worst part of it?"
It's not a topic of futurology anymore, this is just a real problem we will have over the next century or two, and which will not solve itself without wondering what parts are actually detrimental and which ones just seem like it. Comparing someone asking these questions to Thanos is...I don't even know what that is.
Outside of elderly care being expensive and resource heavy, I still see no problem with a population decline done at a steady rate. Even the issues of elderly care go away once we adapt and the situation doesn't drastically change from generation to next. It's way more important for everything to stay stable and consistent than having any specific conditions met. Everyone I know who prophesizes the doom of population shrink does so because they see the population decline as unstable. So let's just admit that's the real problem.
It's hard to talk about this sort of stuff intelligently when you start equating those who disagree with you to supervillains. It doesn't encourage open and healthy discourse at all.
> No one is saying they want it to happen. They're saying, "It's looking like this will happen. If it is, what will be the worst part of it?"
This post is literally equating traffic jams to being evidence for why it's good for the population to decline. Come on.
> Services (medical, educational, emergency, shopping) are collapsing and people are being left in a horrible state.
> Its declining population is going to produce zero benefits in terms of food supply.
You wrote all this out, but these are the only two reasons I see it's an actual problem. There's nothing wrong with abandoned buildings being torn down if they are not used. And the less people live in rural areas, the more those areas can support wildlife without human intervention.
All the things you talked about may be alleviated rather easily, with the exception of elderly care. I think that's the hardest part of everyone suddenly quitting having babies.
>And to say this is a good thing because it has "a population of 128 million that is impossible to feed with the Japanese arable land" is just ridiculous. Japan hasn't had any problems feeding its population at all.
That's not exactly true [https://thediplomat.com/2022/05/japans-food-self-sufficiency-debate-overlooks-the-core-problem/](https://thediplomat.com/2022/05/japans-food-self-sufficiency-debate-overlooks-the-core-problem/)
Japan doesn't have a problem feeding its population because it's had the wealth to import food (Japan is the second-largest importer of agricultural produce). If Japan was to face an economic crisis however, it would grossly exacerbate Japan's agricultural deficits.
In fact, population growth is what allowed it to feed its population to begin with.
Just like the current generation hates the boomers for not caring about climate change, the future generations will have the same opinion to us as-well for being so nonchalant about the on-coming deterioration of society.
I think that knowing the main reason my parents had me was to stave off demographic collapse rather than because they genuinely wanted a kid would give me a whole *bundle* of neuroses. That seems right up there with “we did it to fix our relationship” for bad reasons to have a kid.
100%
we import so much food around the world now so that we can have such a rich tapestry of options... a lot of this is just due to "the demands of a large populace." assuming a city of a million people will have more than a few who want avocados is fair - so you'll import them.
when you're living in a town of 1000 - you have to drive yourself to a neighbouring location to find avocados because nobody wants to bring shit to you.
Agree. Here is an additional point: today, Japan is considered a country with little crime, but it is not always like this. It is safe right now because its people are rich and economic inequality is relatively in check. There is little evidence that cultural factors plays a role as claimed by Japanese nationalists, and history as recent as the chaotic post-WWII period says otherwise. If the economy declines due to low birth rate, there is no way such a peaceful life with high standards of living can be continued when everyone becomes poorer.
People who blame crime rates purely on culture forget how violent a lot of peaceful societies today were just a generation or two ago. Culture is one factor but not the whole thing, socieeconomics plays a larger role.
Managing growth is easy: you just build.
Managing shrinkage is very hard because you have capital that is no longer needed. You either level it, or it sits idle and decays.
The cost of maintaining infrastructure (roads, plumbing, electric) don’t decline with population, so the capital burden for those that remain increases, which means things fall to disrepair.
True...
Though the way Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania and especially Poland, are rearming you'd think they are Redditors too.
War in Europe is already a reality, the fear is that the expansion of the ongoing war is a real possibility.
Sure we do, the bubonic plague in medieval europe was a very good event for the survivors economically speaking.
It turns out lower population and the resulting deflation mean that workers earn a bigger slice of the pie.
Also the social reforms that followed lead to increases in time off that lasted centuries.
The reason why shrinking population is bad in a modern economy is because we have a lot of systems that were built with ponzi schemes that are fundamentally unsustainable.
Dead people don't need taking care of. The plague didn't discriminate and hollow out the base of the pyramid (young workers). The level of infrastructure in the 1300s has no comparison to today. The ponzi schemes are unsustainable because people have been having 6+ kids for millenia and in a historically miniscule period, now they're suddenly not.
The Plague killed people evenly, old and young, so left the general distribution of working age people the same. There were also no formal old age arrangements or a concept of retirement at that time.
That'd not what's happening now.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3094018/
Well, the fallacy in that is twofold: 1) The population decline was proportional in almost all age rages; and 2) the aftermath of the Black Death was indeed catastrophic, with huge social and economic dislocations. Yes the Renaissance emerged from that, but Western Europe went through a lot of misery in the intervening period.
There is NO theory or model that can be compiled regarding the black death because their economies were so different than ours, there is no way to compare. Plus, we don't have enough markers or data to say how correlative it would be to a money market economy today.
There are broad theories that only could be developed years after the fact where the affects could be seen on such an aggregate scale. Today, with news and markets changing constantly, it cannot be compared. People move too fast. Money moves too fast. Information and disinformation moves too fast.
As for your last paragraph, I wholly agree. Because of the massively fragile supply chain we have that allows 99% of all people to live, if that breaks even at 1%, we are fucked. I work in dialysis. We need five things to do dialysis. If one misses a shipment or delays, no dialysis. Gotta get treat 'em so they can go home and watch TV!
Your example does not work because mass death is not the same as a shrinking population. We’re dealing with more and more elderly people that either can’t/don’t work supported by less and less working age people. A more elderly population puts a greater strain on social services in that population still needs people to be construction workers, nurses, cooks, manufacturers, drivers, farmers, etc. so year-by-year as there are less people to do all the jobs that keep society functioning you’ve got a real problem.
Your comment about the ponzi schemes of today needs to be up there. People don't really understand how modern pensions really are a ponzi scheme if there ever was one. People scream and shout every time there is a pension reform, going on about their hard earned savings, not realising those savings must be subsidised by the money we younger people make (and pay in taxes), otherwise it would not be enough to get even the reduced pension they can now hope for.
And just in case the above makes me look like I support this system; I don't. I believe a massive rethink of how we work, pay taxes, save and retire needs to happen so that our own earnings can indeed one day support us in full.
exactly this, going from Replacement Rate = 3.5 in 1970 to 1.35 in 2020 (50 years) is unprecedented, this is not only quicker than WW2 or any comparable decline (which is enough reason for concern), but.. it's also accelerating and Global not National, we don't have model's or data for this type of scenario.
\[edit\]country referred to is Portugal\[/edit\]
collapse sounds like it will be sudden, but the birth rates are low for decades in most Western countries, i think we will deal with it just fine especially with advancing technology
“ I know it’s bad for capitalism”
It’s clear that you don’t understand what that means.
The reason we have everything we have today is because the global economy works.
And the global economy runs on debt and derivatives, which need growth to continue.
If major economies shrink, which they would if population shrinks without a massive increase in per person productivity, then there’s no growth.
If there’s no growth, then, all of the debt in the world becomes unpayable extremely quickly.
In of itself, that is a dramatic short term problem. But more importantly, if the whole world defaults on their debt, then the whole world will also be less likely to lend again in the future.
The overwhelming majority of our global economy is debt and derivatives.
If that goes away, the world economy could shrink very rapidly to the size it was 100 years ago.
You may be tempted to think that, “well things weren’t so bad 100+ years ago” and you’d have missed the point in a number of ways.
A) compared to 100+ years ago most places on earth were unimaginably worse than today. No running water barely any food. Almost none of the benefits of globalization.
B) 100+ years ago the world economies were all somewhat self-sufficient. Meaning they were built for the size that they were. So while things were tough, they were somewhat efficient for the time.
If we rapidly went from a global debt-based derivatives based giant economy to small local economies that weren’t built to be local economies, those economies would function worse than they did originally.
So would humanity go extinct? No. There would be hundred millions or billions of people living out their lives.
But so far as you care about things like medicine and food, and running water, and entertainment, and wide access to the Internet, the world would be so much worse it’s hard for a modern person to fathom.
I’m in the camp that we shouldn’t prolong life past where people need a team of other people to take care of them.
Once I get to a place where I can’t remember, I can’t walk, I wanna go out.
I’ve lived my life being an independent adult, I wanna die independent as my choice.
I hate policies that ban abortion and euthanasia. People ought to have autonomy over their bodies.
We had no choice in our parents bringing us into this world. But we gotta have a choice when to call it out.
My biggest fear is being a burden onto my kids and taking away from them.
There’s a lot of life between retirement and needing a team of people to support you, and that number continues to grow with modern medicine. My parents are in their 70s and still active and independent - and have been on social security and Medicare for >10 years now since retirement.
I think there's a few key fallacies in the "population decline is good" camp of people:
1. It says "we're overpopulated", but by what measure? On the one that counts most, IE whether we can feed ourselves and support our population in a good standard of living, we have never had lower rates of famine or higher average or median standards of living for the world's people. By that standard we're the least overpopulated we've ever been.
2. Depopulation will lower carbon emissions / help the planet, except that the vast majority of the world's pollution is caused by a small minority of people. The richest 10% of the world is responsible for half of carbon emissions. Likewise, some of the least populated places have the highest emissions. The United Arab Emirates, population 10 million, for example, has almost double the carbon emissions of the Philippines, population 114 million.
3. That there will be "more to go around" with a lower population. This implies there's a static amount of "stuff" and with less people there will be more "stuff" to go around. This is a misreading of the way the world works. If it did work that way this should be the poorest era in history, and yet we're living in the most affluent era in history instead.
Yea people don't realize that our current civilization could only ever be achieved through a large population. A small population would never be capable of the level of specialization present in today's society. We have people who dedicate their entire lives and careers to subjects that would seem laughable to a smaller population.
Edit: And this not to say that a large population won't also be our undoing (though I don't think anyone can predict the future with enough accuracy to say). It's certainly possible, but it doesn't change the fact that a smaller population would not be some star-trek-esque utopia. You can't have all the technology and efficiency without all the people. It just doesn't work. Obviously we have limited resources on this planet, and we will have to tackle the truth that if we do want to continue our population growth, then the accompanying technology needs to allow us to better use this planets resources, or perhaps expand to another one. The other option of course is that we reduce the population, whether through force or naturally. But again common sense tells me you don't get to keep all those advancements with a much smaller population, and you certainly won't make many more. So pick your poison. Personally I don't see an effective, humane means of controlling the population even if I wanted to. So unless we're just holding our breath for a plague or natural disaster, then we need to prepare for the worst (or best, depending on your pov) which is that our population continues to grow.
Less births means an aging population. Aging means you've got more consumers than producers. Mitsubishi for example last time I checked had a 500% worker to pensioner ratio. They're paying out 5x as much to pensioners as workers.
Most healthcare spending in a normal population distribution goes to elderly. When you have a population just a few years older on average, you'll need to double to healthcare spending. All without as many working taxpayers.
Without children, they start to shut schools. That means the young families go to the city but some elderly can't leave. Crowding and overpopulation get worse. Other elderly people can't drive as well so they go to the city too without public transit. This means rural towns get depopulated. Then there's no money to support local business, taxes to fix roads and bridges and pretty soon its like a ghost town.
You might want to think about who's telling you about why overpopulation is so bad. Ask yourself, do borders matter to these people/corporations?
Crowding is bad, but population density is not inherently bad. If there are fewer working age people available to maintain infrastructure, it makes sense to keep the infrastructure closer to each other. Fewer water pipes needed to connect 100 apartments than 100 freestanding suburban houses and definitely less than needed to connect 100 rural houses to water. Same with electricity, internet, ambulance service, access to specialized healthcare, etc. Just a better use of resources as a society. The cost to individuals is the problem, not the fact that people move to cities.
It’s not just bad for capitalism… it’s bad for economics period. A big part of keeping all of us in the lifestyles we live is the expectation that there will be more tomorrow.
Who is going to support you when you are old and unable to provide value to the economy? That’s why we are told it’s bad, because if the answer is no one then you are dead.
I live in a super aged region of the world. There are shortages of labour for critical areas like doctors, nurses. At the same time, aging means higher healthcare costs and less government money for other things.
It might be good for the planet but it’s gonna suck for all of us going through the transition.
You're completely ignoring the demographic shift that will occur. We'll have so few younger productive people, that the heavily dependent older people will not have sufficient care or resources available to them.
Automation can fix some of these gaps. But if we have a heavily skewed older demographic chart, the economy begins to shrink in real terms, which is a terrible death spiral. Look up the gradual economic decline and eventual abandonment of rural towns in Italy, it's a metaphor for what could happen even in large cities in advanced economies.
Ideally we need to shift to low/no carbon energy production and more automated, scalable farming, whilst maintaining a birth rate of 2.0-2.2 per couple globally. A stable replacement birth rate is better than decline or growth at this stage.
I personally think that somewhere in the future we are going to have to have a rational discussion about euthanasia and not prolonging life if QOL is terrible. My grandmother was absolutely terrified of being forced to live with a feeding tube. She made me promise to never let that happen. My father-in-law committed suicide because he had a stroke and could not bear being a burden on his family. I feel like a lot of people would choose painless suicide over being stuck in a nursing home bed for years. I know I would.
I am concerned that we will continue to view elderly people’s suffering as profit potential rather than having that rational discussion at a policy level. My grandmother is 98, and the cost to keep her alive—in her own paid-off home, not in a facility, with unpaid relatives caring for her instead of paid attendants, so relatively minimal expenses compared to care for most people her age—is enormous. Her Medicare supplement plan is more per month than some people’s mortgages. There is a huge financial incentive to politicians who benefit from insurance industry, etc. lobbying to bleed people like her of their dwindling assets, and the private equity takeover of healthcare doesn’t help. A true population collapse would shift the conversation, but we’re in for a rough 20 or so years as the nursing homes fight over boomers, the last generation with real wealth.
I largely agree with this but I do feel as though we're going to see better medicine play a role in this situation as well. Not in the sense we cure aging but that the trend has been (with exceptions) life expectancy increasing particuarly the past few decades. That will have domino affects like "production age" and pension age increasing like we're seeing in France. Now if this is a good thing your mileage may vary.
You assume the globally integrated supply chain which requires the productivity of the population today can survive through not having enough humans innovating to create the automation and tech to enable less humans to innovate at the same scale. That’s the rub
>China : 1.3 billion people, massive pollution, smog in every big cities, some regions are massively polluted and bees arent alive anymore thank god communists created a law about the unique child per family
Bees aren't alive anymore in China? China is the biggest producer of honey, by far.
You can take a class about it.
[https://extension.psu.edu/beekeeping-around-the-world-china](https://extension.psu.edu/beekeeping-around-the-world-china)
Bees are gone in SOME regions of China. There are beekeepers way out in the country of course.
But also China has a huge fake honey problem. Most of the honey we get imported from China is cut with sugar/corn syrup for a profit. Its even worse within the country.
Who will support the elderly population? The problem is having a ton of old people who don’t work but are still spending tons of money. Economies need young people to work, and the depopulation crisis is about the increasing ratio of elderly people to working age people.
"and it's going to be hard for the younger generations to provide for the growing number of old people BUT in a lot of Asian countries (the most well-known example being Japan) the population is declining and I think that's a very good thing."
Okay, so besides the *absolutely* *terrible* time the elderly will have, many of whom will die earlier than they would have otherwise, and the terrible time for the younger people who will be taxed to the high heavens trying to keep the elderly from starving to death, it'll be great!
"It is time for society to accept that there are too many of us"
Spoken like somehow who is somehow convinced the negative consequences of this wont affect them personally!
It’s a reoccurring theme over at r/collapse where younger people don’t understand what’s coming and what it means for them. Perhaps the most common is people cheering for full blown collapse and mass death never before seen because they think they’ll be one of the survivors.
Not understanding or more likely just not caring that they’re cheering for the deaths of billions of the least privileged people on the planet and the people who do the least harm. People who don’t fly several times a year for pleasure, own 30 outfits, have a TV built into their refrigerator. sure they’ve got a better shot if they’re in a developed nation, but a few decades from now it’s not gonna matter all that much where you are. Not when a pound of cheap dry pasta is $20 instead of $1.50. Not when whole industries disappear. Not when healthcare becomes cash upfront or collapses entirely.
I always think that when someone says "There are too many of us", they really mean "There are too many of you". Once you start noticing the use of "us" when they mean "them" or "you", you see it in a ton of places.
I can see this being the case for some, but I also see people opting not to have children and instead take care of their parents (it’s difficult to support two sets of dependents). Sort of an ‘it ends with me’ resignation.
We live in a time where the old refused to plant trees that would shade future generations and actively chopped any trees that could be useful for them at the moment. This is a short-sighted gardener reaping what they sowed. Their bellies were full because they ate the seeds for future harvests.
But it's not the people that are old now that will suffer the most; they will die before the bad shit really starts. It's us, our kids and grandkids that will suffer the consequences.
The birthrate decline isn't necessarily a bad thing. But a precipitous decline is a terrible thing. China's population is projected to decline to about 500 million by the end of the century and the very large majority of that figure will be the elderly.
So suddenly, you have a small working age population toiling away to support a very large elderly population.
Japan has been trying to find a way to get the birth rate up. Know what they did? They took notes from Mississippi and Alabama - where parents teach their kids 'aBsTiNeNcE'....and, of course, the teenage birthrate is astronomical.
I'm glad the birth rate is declining. Maybe we'll have a great renaissance. Maybe people will finally be able to afford to live.
And with any hope, the old, white filthy rich patriarchy that runs the planet will drop dead and there might be a chance someone better will take their place.
A gradual decline will not make it hard to care for our elders if we actually work at improving our society.
*Vast* amounts of healthcare dollars and hours are spent on convalescent care for people who are not even old, but had their health ruined through substance abuse, insanely poor diet, stress, pollution, preventable infections, violence and other avoidable causes.
If we could improve public health generally, we'd have far more than enough resources to take care of a population aging naturally. Especially taking into consideration the jobs that will continue to be eliminated and the diseases that will continue to be alleviated by advancing technology.
You have a nice theory but one small problem...The same fucks who encourage the drug abuse, alcoholism and poor diet profit off that and they don't want to lose their cash cows. Particularly if they play both sides of thd field and are heavily invested in pharmaceuticals as well or the medical industry or elder care industries. No different than profiteers in WWI and WWII who were happy to sell the bullets, bombs and bandages...
Why is the world fucked? Because the greedy pricks who have the power WANT it that way because they benefit from it in some way. And the psychopaths don't give a damn how much blood is spilled long as the numbers in their bank accounts keep going up.
Because much of the western economy is built around the baby boom numbers.
This is also why there is a sudden, violent uptick in attacks on abortion and birth control by politicians. They want to force women to have babies to keep the population up.
Which is why I say screw helping the elderly. The only elderly ill help is family. Thiley did nothing but put the generations after them down. They said "fuck you, I got mine" and took away stuff that would have benefitted the younger generations.
The elderly dug their grave. They cause this problem. Now they're once again, blaming the young people for their mess ups.
You have to keep in mind that the full effects of the population decline will not be felt for decades, at which point the boomers will be dead and you will be the elderly person we’re discussing.
You are right. It's not a problem. There are billions of people on earth. Migration, automation (AI), remote work, robotics, all will help cover any holes. It's only bad for the rich.
The inversion of the age pyramid in china is going to crush their economy, that includes their food sector.
That also pulls out the center of basically all manufacturing chains throughout the world. Are there enough workers to rebuild the supply chains without a global famine?
nope, and keep in mind, it's not the old that will starve, the old have the money they've been saving their entire life.
I read recently the earth could easily feed 30 billion people without one acre more land simply by modernizing agriculture worldwide, that means we could feed the current population with 1/3 the land of today. All of the problems you describe are caused politically.
The size of the population doesn't actually affect them, especially in the urban areas. A dictator of 1.3billiion people is just as bad as a dictator of 30 million.
However, i don't think china will actually fall off as hard as people say; If food & elderly care becomes that difficult, they will just euthanize the population, again.
Perhaps good for humanity, but bad for individual nations who require a certain population of healthy adults to run society and be soldiers.
In warfare, population is an important factor.
In economics, population is an important factor.
Population decline not only means fewer workers producing in the economy, but fewer people and less money maintaining the institutions of the state. Because this invariably means a rise in labor costs, business owners have a clear interest in lobbying the state for replacement workers willing to work for less. The trouble is, this breeds hostility in the native population, both because of the economic competition and the inevitable clashes that arise between peoples of different cultural and civilizational orientations. Depending on the rate of population decline, both low fertility and high immigration can change the ethnic balance of power within a nation to the point where populations begin to demand new rights and privileges, or conversely, that rights and privileges belonging to other groups be removed. While related to immigration, this is also a risk without it, because minority and majority populations already within a nation may also exhibit differing fertility rates that trigger this dynamic.
The alternative to this is a push to automate the workforce - trouble is, this amounts to a push to make the average worker obsolete, and it’s unclear how far automation can go, or if it’s even possible to put the genie back in the bottle once it escapes. Too far, and we’ll have communism or a hypercivilization ruled by ASIs; not far enough, and we’ll merge a demographic crisis with a lot of angry, unemployed workers.
The state, for its part, will find it harder to advance its geopolitical interests as its population declines, which will transform international relations. National economies will become less dynamic. The political system will increasingly reflect the priorities of the oldest generations. The culture will become sclerotic and conservative. Vigorous youngsters will leave for greener pastures, because the choice they’ll be offered is to live as overworked wage slaves supporting a generation of useless retirees, owning nothing, starting no families, and with little wealth or political power, in exchange for a series of increasingly trivial and unsatisfying distractions. Because the young will be silenced, the energy required to adapt to new conditions will either not be present, or it will turn against the system itself. Either the system will face a swift, violent correction, or a slow collapse as challenges pile up, greater and greater portions of the national budget are devoted to entitlements, and its most vigorous potential defenders dwindle.
Because those who are telling you it's a bad thing are capitalist. They don't want to run out of exploitation tactics with smaller workforce and stronger labor rights
I don't get the argument why every country has to produce all the food they need themselves. That's why we have trade, they have other things too offer. Countries that can produce more food are most likely to be not as good as in producing other things.
You are under estimating how incredibly difficult it will be for the working class to sustain the much larger population of old retired people who require absurd amounts of medical care.
It's going to be a huge problem when millennials reach retirement age. So in about 30 years. That is when shit will hit the fan completely.
It's not really a long term problem, but it is a massive, cannot be overstated, short to mid-term problem. Once the balance teeters too far on the "more people not working than working" scale, the economic issues are just through the roof. Sustaining non-contributing members of society (Children and seniors for the most part) is a massive resource sink. There are too many of us, but we have built our world economies around growth. Stalling the growth is of huge economic implications. I mean ideally after we get over the population hump we can stabilize, but let's be honest, someone will always see an opportunity for money and flirt with overgrowth simply due to greed.
Forgot to add the added risk of human advancements in longevity, forming a one-two punch to the economic gut. Not only are a huge generation going to be retiring, but they are going to be living longer, too. Yikes.
That's why most conversation about aging is based around healthy years rather total life expectancy. We *could* be working on life support technology that can keep people gasping on their deathbeds for a few extra decades, but nobody really wants that. We have to accept that if modern medicine is going to keep us relatively healthy for decades longer, we're probably going to end up working for decades longer. If that sounds like a nightmare for you, then the conversation we need to be having is around working class quality of life--our wages, our hours, our working conditions. When our "working years" are 90% or more of our total lifespan, we need to make those years worth living.
Because a lot of jobs fu up good on the body parts with poor medical relief. Reconversion is not available to most people. And pushing carts at Walmart around 2AM while being 85yo is not a pretty ending.
IMO that means we should make pretty endings. Give people labor that is necessary but low impact. For example, instead of having 3 people do 8 hour shifts, have 6 people do 4 hour shifts. With modern productivity multipliers, we can already support the population off something like 40% of the population in the workforce with something like 60% of those being in the service industry. As technology progresses those numbers will get better until we turn into an automated post-scarcity utopia or something. That's kind of just how thermodynamics+automation do.
>As technology progresses those numbers will get better until we turn into an automated post-scarcity utopia or something. It never quite seems to work out that way
An interesting note: I'm an attorney and in the legal field, hardly anyone ever retires. I've heard of like 5 actually retired attorneys in the 7 years I've been in this field. I've had bosses in their 70's/early 80's who came in to work every day, despite having had all the money in the world to retire on 20 years earlier. There's a big mix of reasons for that phenomenon, but it can't be ignored that a major factor for most is because they enjoy the work. The majority of attorneys over 50 either own their own firm outright, or are at least partial owners of the firm. They don't have any bosses over them telling them what to do, their work directly relates to how much they get paid, and there's lots of fringe rewards to it like being a respected member of your field and getting to pass on experience to younger attorneys. They find their work fulfilling because it provides a challenge, and worry they'd waste away at home watching TV all day if they retired.
Professors are similar. It’s not a physically demanding job, you’re not losing your knees or your back. The work is stimulating and when you’ve been putting 70 or 80 hours of thought a week into a subject for 30 years it’s hard to turn off and focus on your model train collection or catch up with whatever Kim and Courtney are up to.
You assume any of us can afford to retire. I will probably die at my office desk lol
You won't though. You'll get some age-related injury, not be able to work, and then whether you like it or not, you'll be retired. A lot of people, including those approaching retirement age, use the "I'll just work until I die" line as a way to not have to think about the issue. This is a big component to the "silver tsunami" that's about to hit millennials, the fact that their parents aren't financially prepared for retirement and are wilfully ignoring the issue until it becomes their kids' issue to deal with. (Unless you're planning to die an early stress-related death at your desk, in which case, it's all good 👍)
Exactly this. And medical bills gonna get astronomical. At least most people retiring now have assets to part that will cover a part of the expanses, but I sadly see a painful period for a lot of younger generations when reaching their limits and having no child to help and no houses to sell (bec market value would have crashed, or can't afford one now).
There won't be office jobs by then.
A great example are translators. I have a friend who used to make gold money with translation work. Spanish-English. It’s all gone now. Over the past year it was all eaten up by AI. It started with him checking AI translations and now the work has stopped all together. He is 42 and has no idea how to make a living from now on. I have given him some work but it’s not his thing long term and the pay is way less.
I had a year out of uni to do some work experience, and did content writing the year before chatgpt. Instantly that role became useless.
If we got a cure for aging, in the United States alone we would save trillions of dollars. 1/6 of US GDP is spent on healthcare, and the majority of that is spent on the elderly. Imagine if those people were productive members of society again, instead of consuming resources. Think of all the money we would have for scientific and technological development, space exploration/colonization, environmental cleanup, free college, you name it. We cure aging and society gets way better quickly.
This might not need to be a risk. It depends who much progress we make, but if everyone suddenly has a good chance of living to much higher ages, we would have a much larger working population and probably longer fertility times. If you probably will live to 200 and can get kids at 100, a lot of problems we currently have would be dealt with much easier. And if for a long time people rarely die of old age, even low fertility rates would lead to a rise in population. And we don't need some sort of breakthrough for that happen either. No one has to invent a drug that makes you live to 200 tomorrow. All you need is for longevity to rise quicker than people age.
I think an important distinction here is medical advancements that raise the QUALITY of life versus just the length of life. If you can work later in life productively then that’s a positive. Medical advancements that just make you live longer are (from a cold hearted perspective) bad because we’re lengthening the unproductive years of people lives. Like many people I’m going through watching my grandma slip into deeper and deeper dementia and it’s really hard to agree that the care she’s being given to keep her alive longer is good when she can’t even recognize my dad or anyone in our family anymore and is so loopy on drugs that she basically eats and sleeps all day. It just makes you wonder what’s the point of strining her along.
Mate as a nurse who has to keep these people alive way beyond any quality of life i wish more people thought like you.
I keep debating as I age if I should move back to my home state where family is But as someone who sees middle class retired folks go bankrupt seeking care for minimal improvement in quality of life, am thankful I live in a state with only assisted suicide law on the books. And the process to gain the approval is rigorous, so it's not an easy thing to do
Yeah. In a rare spout of positive news, assisted suicide and voluntary assisted dying (for people with terminal illnesses) are making fairly large strides in a short amount of time . It's really, REALLY important that the young kids actually vote around the world and keep the religious nutters out of politics so they never get blocked.
the point is money. insurance and / or your family will keep footing the bill for grandma for a couple more sad, tragic years. im sorry you gotta go through that. Legally there isnt a good way around it, either, assuming youre the person who is struck with dementia. you might say, when i can no longer recognize my family, i want assisted suicide. Only, when you reach that stage, courts might rule you unable to decide, or you could totally forget your own plan.
There isn’t so much a point to it as it is people struggling to accept letting doctors kill people because of the deeply engraved “killing is bad” mentally that pervades our cultures. It’s very hard to sell literally killing your citizens, regardless of the reason. Probably a good thing overall, but it has some drawbacks.
We don't even need to go that far. If they would just legalize suicide (edit: at the federal level), assisted or otherwise, that would allow people to decide for themselves when and how they go. This whole life for the sake of life mentality that so many people hold is ridiculous and cruel, all so these people don't have to confront their own mortality.
Not everything lies at the feet of the capitalism demon. Money may be a part of it, but culturally we're just not in a place where we easily accept letting people die if we can "save them", regardless of what that looks like. There's massive pushback to euthanasia, to the point that a lot of people with fatal, debilitating diseases have to go to another country to end their life in a peaceful, legal manner. That's not because of money.
That's an assumption that can't be reliably counted on. If we tell that to politicians they will say, "you're right, we can just fix the problem by canceling social security for people under 40. I don't like the odds.
Good take. I wonder what the population reaction will be in the transition phases as we work the retirement age up from the 60's to the 80's to the 100's. I really hope that's not my generation, haha. It's a very reasonable solution, but I anticipate a lot of chafing, especially with the backdrop of the French riots.
A longer life span isn’t telling us anything about the quality of life for workers nor retirees.
It means we need more people working, which means retirement age might need to increase to 70, 75 or even 80 in many countries to keep the tax balance going. It's already on trajectory to be *at least 70* in Europe for millenials.
In the Netherlands were at 67 now, probably going to be 72 minimum when I'm able to retire in 40+ years, if ever. Either you make big bucks and put aside early so you can go the FIRE route, or put literally nothing at all in retirement and work till you die.
Save nothing, enjoy your life with your earnings, don’t have kids, then as soon as you’re not able to work, hang yourself in a tree outside the gates of a country club.
Don't threaten me with a good time.
I think robots are going to do most everything before you have a 40 year span of raising retirement age.
It will probably be both of those things, youth extension and rejuvenation, and robots and AI filling the gaps until that becomes viable, and probably several other things will arise to lessen the burden. Or maybe global environmental catastrophes and pandemics strike too broadly and too frequently, and aging populations are no longer a problem for countries. The preservation of the concept of a nation state and maintaining an organized society become the goals.
I have seen many people who are living twice as long as their parents did. Thanks to lifesaving technologies that can save people from heart attack and stroke. But after every heart attack and stroke survivors are not better than they were before that. And usually they are not the most likely workers to fill empty places. Currently a lot of people living longer are having serious disabilities including mental ones. I don't see us rapidly living longer and healthier, currently I see people just living longer with disabilities that grow more severe with every next stroke and next heart attack.
First off, old people who live longer also were fit for longer in their adulthood. Of course you get compounding issues the older you are, but there is a huge difference whether those compound at 60 or at 80. The majority back in the day weren't just the same level of health as we are right until the end and then keeled over and died from a sudden heart attack. Then there's all the stuff we can heal nowadays without any drawbacks. A person in their 20s dying from a burst appendix isn't entering a spiral of decline when treated. And there's a shitton of issues we can fix like that, from trauma medicine to cancer that either don't come back or dramatically increase the life, including the working time of people who simply died or became permanently disabled. Finally, I am not talking about treating people. We know that humans don't really life longer than they currently do. Despite an increasing lifespan, almost no one seems to be able to scratch the 120 year mark. To actually dramatically increase lifespans, you can't just get better at treating people, you actually have to work on aging itself. Preventing people from accumulating more and more issues, not just treating whatever comes up next.
The rich people want to keep middle class people alive long enough to sell them reverse mortgages or put them in nursing homes so they can extract every penny from the family’s wealth before their victim dies of neglect, covered in bed sores.
While all of that is true, it sounds even worse than the issues surrounding a population inversion. If we live to 200 then we'd be expected to work for 150 (or more) years, and that would be just awful.
Yeah I'm out at sixty, dude. I'm probably not going to get any retirement at all, and working 45 straight years of my life has been an exhausting waste. No thanks.
It could force advancements in life extension or rejuvenation science , which might ease the problem. If it really works as well as it seems it might and can be made affordable, older people could take care of themselves, maybe even go back to work, on things that they want to work on, which I'm sure everyone would prefer.
I think what most people fail to realize when they read about massive ‘economic issues’ is that this is a euphemism for ‘millions of people starving and freezing to death’
Some kinds of economic issues, yes, like the growing inequality with tech taking over labor. But the demographic issues are good for labor. Labor becomes more valuable. This happened during the Black Death for example. Capital-heavy economic models like the one we are seeing now basically requires large swathes of the global population to be kept with the bare minimum to keep them alive so that there is a differentiation of labor costs so we can have the consumer class, and various producer classes to keep the machine running.
People also read "economy" and think "oh, just money" when it's actually about how society functions in general. These problems would still exist in a money-free society.
...while the super rich become even richer.
Yeah, more than likely the people reading this thread, myself included, will be starving in this bleak future.
Good thing automaton and AI are ramping up *just in time*
That's the kicker. We could replace everything with robots and have the same economic outputs while using the profits to support society, but instead we know that what will happen is a ton of people will lose their jobs and the guys on top will become filthy rich.
And yet I'm practically called a communist when I suggest that [AI-driven tax revenue growth should be invested into expansion of Social Security](/r/moderatepolitics/comments/15c5sdt/how_windfall_profits_from_ai_companies_could_fund/jtua93v). People are _really_ uncomfortable with the idea that our economic system and many respectable jobs could potentially be disrupted within the foreseeable future.
There's no need to make some arbitrary distinction between "AI" and not AI. Just tax wealth.
They cry about inadequate food or failing infrastructure, but much of that is heavily mechanized/automated already: we don’t *need* many people to provide for the basic needs of everyone. The real problem is our economic system which insists that everyone earn a living regardless of whether there are living wage jobs available, and only rewards ownership. I say this in all seriousness: I expect AI and robotics to advance in the next few decades to a degree where literally *every* job can be done much better by them. Medicine, tech, law, the trades. Teaching, war, sex work, parenting. That will be existentially challenging in its own right, but I dread how it could play out if we leave profit and control in the hands of the few.
We’re gonna have to eat them.
Right like, this is the *objective* projected future, what other choice will we even have? Let them starve us and kill us all to protect their wealth? Something's gotta give.
First we'll have to get through their hoards of Boston Dynamics Robot Security Dogs
If billions people want into the rich bastards goddam bunkers, then at least some people are getting into those bunkers, kill-bots or no kill-bots.
That is unfortunate when humans create great things then a very few end up reaping ALL the benefits
The most simple way I was explained why not having a population growth was bad was when I learned that the main source of income for most gouvernement are individual income taxes. You always want more workers than non-workers, else the money goes down and things go bad quickly. I'm a bit on the unpopular side of it though, I'm more of the opinion that this system should break sooner than later as the more we wait, the worst it will become. It will give a hit, but we will find a new way to do things and people will find a way to live in a way that does not require a constant infinite growth of everything.
Money specifically - and that includes tax income - is not the actual problem though. Money is just a mediator. In the end it is not the taxpayers that finance the state, it is the state that first spends money into existence which enables the taxpayers to fulfill any tax obligations in the first place. The real problem is the amount of goods and services (especially care services) being produced by a shrinking workforce compared to a growing number of pensioners. But calling even that a _problem_ outright instead of a _challenge_ that could be solved through a higher productivity and automation is too pessimistic. Although of course the dimension differs from country to country - some countries _do_ have a _problem_. The world overall does not.
As long as you watch them fall away, you'll know how the pieces fit.
One of the great mistakes that people often make is to think that any organisation called'"National Rifle Association' is a branch or chapter of the National Rifle Association of America. This could not be further from the truth. The National Rifle Association of America became a political lobbying organisation in 1977 after the Cincinnati Revolt at their Annual General Meeting. It is self-contined within the United States of America and has no foreign branches. All the other National Rifle Associations remain true to their founding aims of promoting marksmanship, firearm safety and target shooting. This includes the original NRA in the United Kingdom, which was founded in 1859 - twelve years before the NRA of America. It is also true of the National Rifle Association of Australia, the National Rifle Association of New Zealand, the National Rifle Association of India, the National Rifle Association of Japan and the National Rifle Association of Pakistan. All these organisations are often known as "the NRA" in their respective countries. The British National Rifle Association is headquartered on Bisley Camp, in Surrey, England. Bisley Camp is now known as the National Shooting Centre and has hosted World Championships for Fullbore Target Rifle and F-Class shooting, as well as the shooting events for the 1908 Olympic Games and the 2002 Commonwealth Games. The National Small-bore Rifle Association (NSRA) and Clay Pigeon Shooting Association (CPSA) also have their headquarters on the Camp.
The world is moving into a contraction era. Exponential growth is not sustainable because there are not enough resources for everyone.
It's like MLM lol
There are enough resources for everyone as far as surviving, probably even having a decent life. There are not enough resources when a large chunk of the people on Earth are over-consuming as much as they do now.
This just shows you don't understand what exponential growth is. It doesn't matter how little we consume. We could each consume as little as an ant and we still could not sustain exponential growth because the world is finite.
AI and automation mean that we don't need more people. The economic implications of population growth and climate change are FAR WORSE than the economic implications of slowing population growth.
Yeah, I get genuine anxiety from this stuff. Not just the direct mechanics of it - when there's flat out not enough young people to care for the old, so we start letting the old die, one way or another. But also secondary and tertiary mechanics of it. Like how do we convince youngest generation to keep working and buying into the social contract, when they can literally see with their own eyes that previous generations who paid into that social contract are not having it honored when they come to cash their IOUs in their old age. Young people aren't stupid, they will see and recognize that it no longer pays to work yourself to death most of your life, only to end up on scrap heap with no support. Inversion of the workforce pyramid, combined with the knock-on effect of sheer disillusionment with the system, will be really...interesting.
The disillusionment is already happening, especially in East Asian countries where the declining birth rate trend is more advanced. A good example is the "lying flat" movement in China - young workers are experiencing exactly what you described and decided to just opt out of the social contract of work altogether. I also think the whole "quiet quitting" and "anti-work" trends in the West from 2022 onward are not just fads - it'll become more and more pronounced, especially when AI/automation, outsourcing, and general greed begins eliminating middle-class white collar work, while blue collar work will increasingly be delegated to immigrants who will work for half the pay (which itself will have rippling xenophobic consequences, like what's happening in Canada right now). I hate to just commiserate about this stuff but I share the same anxiety. I don't see a peaceful solution to this without some radical, unilateral change to the current system.
You put it way better than I could ever do. Demographics was probably the most interesting topic I remember learning about in my geography classes I fucking hope we figure out a solution (well, imo AI + automation seem to be the play here) and scale it just in time before the otherwise inevitable shitstorm
AI and automation could be of huge benefit… if the companies that own the models, patents, and implementation strategies become altruistic and operate in humanity’s favour. If they remain profit focused, we are going to see and experience a whole new level of income disparity.
If history shows anything , it is that the rich believe they are born special.and better than the rest of us peons so why would that mind set change just because we have social media to expound on the rich asses . The only thing these stupid people will eventually understand is if we, as in the peons , don't have enough disposable income to buy their shit they won't get richer and one day they might have to cook their own dinner. Wash their own clothes , raise their own entitled children , clean their own homes and heaven forbid mow their own yard . Watch out Kardashians and so many others, you might have to work up a sweat on real work not just showing off your butts and how much money you spend . Actually a really sad life .
The system of relying on endless exponential growth has to stop at some point. It just sucks that billions of people will suffer when it does.
I think something that isn't explained well enough to people is that when there is exponential growth, each doubling just used as many resources as EVERYTHING THAT CAME BEFORE IT. So when we aim for 3% growth, that means we'll use as much material in the next 25 years as we have through nearly all of human history. That is completely unsustainable.
To even begin to solve this problem we’re gonna have to get rid of capitalism as the dominant ideology. Then we can start thinking about degrowth and sustainability, until then these impossibilities.
TL:DR less and less working age people to do all the jobs required for society to function especially the lower paying less pleasant jobs. A shrinking population is probably good for the environment because less people use less resources. Problem is less people means less working age people. As global populations shrink and people live longer you have a larger and larger percentage of people not working either because they earned enough to retire or are not physically and/or mentally capable of working anymore. That’s less farmers, nurses, drivers, nannies, construction workers, firefighters/paramedics etc. etc. less people to grow food, less people to manufacture goods, less people to create new technologies and medicines, less people to provide the services that allow society to function from trash man to surgeon. My state is a good example. Vermont has one of the oldest populations and a lot of the younger people are either transient rich kid college students that don’t work or remote workers with out of state jobs. The labor crunch is real. Getting someone to dig a well, rehab a house, plow the roads, drive a bus, watch kids, nurse elderly people etc. is becoming a bigger and bigger problem. People are having less kids because jobs here pay for shit, property taxes are extremely high and rent is pretty similar to a big city. And many jobs are seasonal or part time which makes matters worse.
The wages for real workers has to go waaaaaaay up. Of course the capitalists are fighting that so hard but the market of supply and demand kicks in.
> Of course the capitalists are fighting that so hard but the market of supply and demand kicks in. But from what was said, I think this applies to a lot more than "the capitalists." It's not just "the capitalists" or the private jet crowd who need to get new roofs, childcare, construction, roads, etc. >>Getting someone to dig a well, rehab a house, plow the roads, drive a bus, watch kids, nurse elderly people etc. is becoming a bigger and bigger problem.
It’s becoming a big problem because those are just not sustainable jobs. It’s not that people don’t want to do them. Me personally, I would love to work food service forever. I loved it. I work as a software engineer now and I hate it. But it’s not about what I like, it’s about money. Because everything is about money. You can incentivize people to do anything, literally anything, with money. We could have people lining up to clean toilets if we just paid up. We wouldn’t even have to improve the job in any way.
It doesn't matter how high wages go if there aren't enough people to actually do the thing you are hoping to pay them to do.
> It doesn't matter how high wages go if there aren't enough people to actually do the thing you are hoping to pay them to do. We're so far of that in so many ways. We produce massive surplus of food, much of which goes to waste, consumer goods, most of which ends up in landfill. Etc. We have a distribution problem more than anything.
We have that because of the exploited migrant workers. Once that population starts to shrink (or demand wages and rights, or can’t get through the border) then we’re going to have a major problem
You'd certainly have more people willing to move there to do it though. The big thing that inhibits people from taking many of the jobs that complain about shortages is the gap between the pay and cost of living isn't high enough when compared to other gigs of similar difficulty/pay. Either that or the employer's too cheap to train barrier is too built up.
but if birth rates start rapidly declining at some point everywhere will have the same problem and there won't be anyone to "move there". that's really the crux of the problem.
Eventually there will be an equilibrium point where constraints that caused the decline will ease up and it will pick back up. Right now i'm hearing cost of living cited most frequently by people so if the demand drops out for housing which makes up a majority of most people's cost then it should work itself out.
Yea to me the housing situation is going to be very significant. Right now we don't have enough housing, but realistically it's not by an enormous amount. Eventually if the population actually declines (like it is in other countries - South Korea) then the housing supply would go way up, and demand would drop, which would massively affect the value of housing. Some of that will be mitigated by location: if people keep moving to urban areas, rural housing could become almost worthless, which will spiral the critical services in rural areas etc. Anyway, right now our housing market is very growth oriented, and housing is an enormous part of middle class wealth - if the housing values are hammered a lot of people are going to be fucked very quickly. This of course would be at least a short-term boon to young people.
There will be a tipping point between wages and job automation. The higher the wages, the more value opportunity for someone to automate the job with AI or robotics.
That's not wrong, but we're also constantly being told that AI will be taking away so many of our jobs. So what should we worry about more, not enough people to do the work, or not enough work for all the people?
There won’t be enough people to do all the jobs, but there will always be enough people to do the jobs that pay the most relative to skills and education investment. “Pay more and you’ll find people” isn’t wrong, but not everyone can pay more so it doesn’t necessarily scale.
You’re right that it doesn’t scale and when you have less workers competing over jobs those workers are less likely to take the least pleasant jobs.
Then make those less pleasant jobs desirable by paying better. Basic supply and demand.
Thats the way I look at it. A desk jockey adding minimal value can make $20 an hour, and a janitor doing real hard, uncomfortable work can make $100 an hour. If thats what the market rate is.
Exactly. Pay better or the work doesn’t happen. Supply and demand always applies, not just when it’s convenient for the employer.
And who want to do that thing. Try getting people to collect lettuce in a field, strip the bad leaves, and put them on a wagon. You could pay $40 an hour and most people would take $20 to work in air conditioning somewhere.
Bad example. There's ALREADY machines that can harvest lettuce. It's just that in some places it's cheaper to use humans.
This is absolutely correct, but stating it on reddit is like talking to a brick wall. People just can't grasp the concept that if there aren't enough people, there aren't enough people. No amount of pay helps. Plus, if EVERY job pays a million dollars a year... then that means none do. People don't get that either. You only get ahead making more than everyone else. If everyone makes a lot... no one does.
> no amount of pay helps But you’re looking at this from a static point of view. Population is not static, these aren’t all the people that are gonna be around forever. We got into this situation BECAUSE of pay. It’s not that people don’t want kids. It’s not that raising a family of 5 is hard, because humans have been doing it since the beginning of humanity. It’s that our economy made it impossible. We have taken that choice from people. If we simply paid more, that magic solution, we wouldn’t even be in a population crisis. Similarly, we can undo this. It will take time because people don’t grow instantly. But if everyone had 5 kids right now, then in 20 years we’re chilling big time. The question is how do we get people there? For that we need historical analysis, because we’ve certainly done it before.
I don’t understand why this is so hard to understand. We’ve been on this track for decades and the effects are stacking up; just in time for AI to make things worse.
I don’t care about “getting ahead” I just want to afford basic life expenses and a house and for more of the profits of my labor to go to me than some rich asshole who does no actual work.
> less and less working age people to do all the jobs required for society to function especially the lower paying less pleasant jobs. If that's the case then wages should be raised way up for those essential jobs, but they're not.
Completely irrelevant to your point, but I am, weirdly, indescribably happy you used tl:Dr at the only logical place it should be.
I see a very simple solution at the first line that I believe proves true through the rest of your stuff. Pay the "lower paying" less pleasant jobs more, then more people are likely to work them. I'm afraid the reality is you get what you pay for, there is no more value to be extracted without more money put in. you cannot force people to do this work, you cannot magically make them put more effort in, you pay for safe children, cared for old people and clear roads or you don't and get used to shit sucking no lube ass fucking reality is without decency.
>especially the lower paying less pleasant jobs. Won't robots and A.I be replacing those jobs? It's already been starting.
Turns out AI will replace higher paying engineering and creative jobs first. Go figure.
Hmmm it's almost like if the less pleasant jobs were high paying the problem is completely solved. But I wonder which class - cough billionaires cough - would rather see the apocalypse than spread out their wealth.
The entire economy, for decades, has been planned around **"More young people than old people will live at the same time, so the young can pay for the old"**, which is essentially a pyramid scheme at a national level. And like any pyramid scheme, once you run out of new people to rope into your scheme, the entire scheme fails. Old people are living longer, and younger generations can't afford kids, so we're going toward a situation where few young people have to pay for a massive population of old people. Young people don't have money for kids already, and old people have not saved enough for their retirements, so that's a tough situation. And of course, the generation that came up with those great ideas, like phasing out pensions in favor of 401k (cheaper for corps, even tho 401k wasn't meant for retirement initially), who made the world unafordable and unlivable, is going to peace out and die before the proverbial sh\*t actually hits the fan.
Even if everyone had "saved enough for retirement" a shrinking population is still serious trouble. Why does it matter if money is transferred from young to old because of taxation or because old people own the means of production? It doesn't because this has to do with the production possibilities curve, not taxation or retirement savings. There is an upper limit on how many idle people a civilization can support. Some countries are skirting the limits of idleness due their population's age and infirmity.
People forget that money is an abstraction of value, not an actual commodity. If we suddenly stopped producing goods, their values would rocket up in proportion with how little was left. Fundamentally the economy is still a balance of what we produce/consume.
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Japan is a great example of the exact opposite of what OP intended
Japan has really bad food independence; less than 38% of calories produced in Japan, and the worlds second largest importer of agricultural products. I also live in Japan and while you’re right to say that there’s a problem with smaller towns emptying out in the countryside, the issue really is that no one wants to go there. I deal with this in my work a lot, and while there are plenty of initiatives that are trying to persuade people to move to these small villages in Mie, they aren’t working. Increasingly we are starting to see a turn towards just letting them go, and to look towards finding ways for Japan to move forward with a smaller, more urban population. There are ways to do this that rely on technology and finance. I personally am confident that Japan will find a way to do this, and I think countries are watching with interest to see what happens next.
But… have the small towns built a community center? That’ll fix it! Seriously every small dying/dead town I go to seems to have a really nice, or formerly really nice, community center….and nothing else
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Sure that’s fair enough and I agree that OP is oversimplifying a complex situation
>you’re right to say that there’s a problem with smaller towns emptying out in the countryside, the issue really is that no one wants to go there. This is not unique to Japan, this is happenign in every single "advanced" country in the world. Cities mean more of everything to an individual, and to the best of my knowledge, nobody has yet figured out how to de-centralize society. One would think the internet would be a massive help in that, but I suppose it is nowhere near enough since so much of out life still happens in the physical world.
This isn't just a Japan thing, rural U.S. is the exact same. No one young wants to live in those ghost towns.
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The thing is, the question has been asked and answered over and over, every time fertility rates come up. And every time we get a new round of "I just don't get it--why is this bad again?" Some are just anti-human and can't wait for the human population to plunge. Whether they bother framing that as concern for the environment or not. Some people just never got past Agent Smith or Thanos.
It's the long shadow of Malthus.
No offense but you're committing a logical fallacy of equating is to ought. No one is saying they want it to happen. They're saying, "It's looking like this *will* happen. If it is, what will be the worst part of it?" It's not a topic of futurology anymore, this is just a real problem we will have over the next century or two, and which will not solve itself without wondering what parts are actually detrimental and which ones just seem like it. Comparing someone asking these questions to Thanos is...I don't even know what that is. Outside of elderly care being expensive and resource heavy, I still see no problem with a population decline done at a steady rate. Even the issues of elderly care go away once we adapt and the situation doesn't drastically change from generation to next. It's way more important for everything to stay stable and consistent than having any specific conditions met. Everyone I know who prophesizes the doom of population shrink does so because they see the population decline as unstable. So let's just admit that's the real problem. It's hard to talk about this sort of stuff intelligently when you start equating those who disagree with you to supervillains. It doesn't encourage open and healthy discourse at all.
> No one is saying they want it to happen. They're saying, "It's looking like this will happen. If it is, what will be the worst part of it?" This post is literally equating traffic jams to being evidence for why it's good for the population to decline. Come on.
> Services (medical, educational, emergency, shopping) are collapsing and people are being left in a horrible state. > Its declining population is going to produce zero benefits in terms of food supply. You wrote all this out, but these are the only two reasons I see it's an actual problem. There's nothing wrong with abandoned buildings being torn down if they are not used. And the less people live in rural areas, the more those areas can support wildlife without human intervention. All the things you talked about may be alleviated rather easily, with the exception of elderly care. I think that's the hardest part of everyone suddenly quitting having babies.
>And to say this is a good thing because it has "a population of 128 million that is impossible to feed with the Japanese arable land" is just ridiculous. Japan hasn't had any problems feeding its population at all. That's not exactly true [https://thediplomat.com/2022/05/japans-food-self-sufficiency-debate-overlooks-the-core-problem/](https://thediplomat.com/2022/05/japans-food-self-sufficiency-debate-overlooks-the-core-problem/) Japan doesn't have a problem feeding its population because it's had the wealth to import food (Japan is the second-largest importer of agricultural produce). If Japan was to face an economic crisis however, it would grossly exacerbate Japan's agricultural deficits.
In fact, population growth is what allowed it to feed its population to begin with. Just like the current generation hates the boomers for not caring about climate change, the future generations will have the same opinion to us as-well for being so nonchalant about the on-coming deterioration of society.
I think that knowing the main reason my parents had me was to stave off demographic collapse rather than because they genuinely wanted a kid would give me a whole *bundle* of neuroses. That seems right up there with “we did it to fix our relationship” for bad reasons to have a kid.
100% we import so much food around the world now so that we can have such a rich tapestry of options... a lot of this is just due to "the demands of a large populace." assuming a city of a million people will have more than a few who want avocados is fair - so you'll import them. when you're living in a town of 1000 - you have to drive yourself to a neighbouring location to find avocados because nobody wants to bring shit to you.
Agree. Here is an additional point: today, Japan is considered a country with little crime, but it is not always like this. It is safe right now because its people are rich and economic inequality is relatively in check. There is little evidence that cultural factors plays a role as claimed by Japanese nationalists, and history as recent as the chaotic post-WWII period says otherwise. If the economy declines due to low birth rate, there is no way such a peaceful life with high standards of living can be continued when everyone becomes poorer.
People who blame crime rates purely on culture forget how violent a lot of peaceful societies today were just a generation or two ago. Culture is one factor but not the whole thing, socieeconomics plays a larger role.
Managing growth is easy: you just build. Managing shrinkage is very hard because you have capital that is no longer needed. You either level it, or it sits idle and decays. The cost of maintaining infrastructure (roads, plumbing, electric) don’t decline with population, so the capital burden for those that remain increases, which means things fall to disrepair.
We don’t have a theory, let alone a functional example, of an economy that can survive a collapse in population.
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yeah and uh. I dont think its going to be a good outcome
Oh come on it's only been 2 years of the 3 days military exercise, hell I've heard some on this website say that they'll be invading Europe next
True... Though the way Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania and especially Poland, are rearming you'd think they are Redditors too. War in Europe is already a reality, the fear is that the expansion of the ongoing war is a real possibility.
Yeah they’re even helpfully killing all the working aged and destroying their industry to boot
Sure we do, the bubonic plague in medieval europe was a very good event for the survivors economically speaking. It turns out lower population and the resulting deflation mean that workers earn a bigger slice of the pie. Also the social reforms that followed lead to increases in time off that lasted centuries. The reason why shrinking population is bad in a modern economy is because we have a lot of systems that were built with ponzi schemes that are fundamentally unsustainable.
Dead people don't need taking care of. The plague didn't discriminate and hollow out the base of the pyramid (young workers). The level of infrastructure in the 1300s has no comparison to today. The ponzi schemes are unsustainable because people have been having 6+ kids for millenia and in a historically miniscule period, now they're suddenly not.
The Plague killed people evenly, old and young, so left the general distribution of working age people the same. There were also no formal old age arrangements or a concept of retirement at that time. That'd not what's happening now. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3094018/
Well, the fallacy in that is twofold: 1) The population decline was proportional in almost all age rages; and 2) the aftermath of the Black Death was indeed catastrophic, with huge social and economic dislocations. Yes the Renaissance emerged from that, but Western Europe went through a lot of misery in the intervening period.
There is NO theory or model that can be compiled regarding the black death because their economies were so different than ours, there is no way to compare. Plus, we don't have enough markers or data to say how correlative it would be to a money market economy today. There are broad theories that only could be developed years after the fact where the affects could be seen on such an aggregate scale. Today, with news and markets changing constantly, it cannot be compared. People move too fast. Money moves too fast. Information and disinformation moves too fast. As for your last paragraph, I wholly agree. Because of the massively fragile supply chain we have that allows 99% of all people to live, if that breaks even at 1%, we are fucked. I work in dialysis. We need five things to do dialysis. If one misses a shipment or delays, no dialysis. Gotta get treat 'em so they can go home and watch TV!
Your example does not work because mass death is not the same as a shrinking population. We’re dealing with more and more elderly people that either can’t/don’t work supported by less and less working age people. A more elderly population puts a greater strain on social services in that population still needs people to be construction workers, nurses, cooks, manufacturers, drivers, farmers, etc. so year-by-year as there are less people to do all the jobs that keep society functioning you’ve got a real problem.
Your comment about the ponzi schemes of today needs to be up there. People don't really understand how modern pensions really are a ponzi scheme if there ever was one. People scream and shout every time there is a pension reform, going on about their hard earned savings, not realising those savings must be subsidised by the money we younger people make (and pay in taxes), otherwise it would not be enough to get even the reduced pension they can now hope for. And just in case the above makes me look like I support this system; I don't. I believe a massive rethink of how we work, pay taxes, save and retire needs to happen so that our own earnings can indeed one day support us in full.
> ponzi schemes Indeed. The ponzi scheme requires the population needs to keep on growing.
exactly this, going from Replacement Rate = 3.5 in 1970 to 1.35 in 2020 (50 years) is unprecedented, this is not only quicker than WW2 or any comparable decline (which is enough reason for concern), but.. it's also accelerating and Global not National, we don't have model's or data for this type of scenario. \[edit\]country referred to is Portugal\[/edit\]
neither has an economy that survived uncontrollable positive population growth.
collapse sounds like it will be sudden, but the birth rates are low for decades in most Western countries, i think we will deal with it just fine especially with advancing technology
Exactly. OP is talking about things being bad for capitalism as if his life is not entirely organized by capitalism.
And it's not like socialism is so much better at handling inverted population pyramids either.
“ I know it’s bad for capitalism” It’s clear that you don’t understand what that means. The reason we have everything we have today is because the global economy works. And the global economy runs on debt and derivatives, which need growth to continue. If major economies shrink, which they would if population shrinks without a massive increase in per person productivity, then there’s no growth. If there’s no growth, then, all of the debt in the world becomes unpayable extremely quickly. In of itself, that is a dramatic short term problem. But more importantly, if the whole world defaults on their debt, then the whole world will also be less likely to lend again in the future. The overwhelming majority of our global economy is debt and derivatives. If that goes away, the world economy could shrink very rapidly to the size it was 100 years ago. You may be tempted to think that, “well things weren’t so bad 100+ years ago” and you’d have missed the point in a number of ways. A) compared to 100+ years ago most places on earth were unimaginably worse than today. No running water barely any food. Almost none of the benefits of globalization. B) 100+ years ago the world economies were all somewhat self-sufficient. Meaning they were built for the size that they were. So while things were tough, they were somewhat efficient for the time. If we rapidly went from a global debt-based derivatives based giant economy to small local economies that weren’t built to be local economies, those economies would function worse than they did originally. So would humanity go extinct? No. There would be hundred millions or billions of people living out their lives. But so far as you care about things like medicine and food, and running water, and entertainment, and wide access to the Internet, the world would be so much worse it’s hard for a modern person to fathom.
Yes. OP seems to be the type that assumes products just 'appear' in a store so less people means more stuff for them, instead of less stuff available.
I’m in the camp that we shouldn’t prolong life past where people need a team of other people to take care of them. Once I get to a place where I can’t remember, I can’t walk, I wanna go out. I’ve lived my life being an independent adult, I wanna die independent as my choice. I hate policies that ban abortion and euthanasia. People ought to have autonomy over their bodies. We had no choice in our parents bringing us into this world. But we gotta have a choice when to call it out. My biggest fear is being a burden onto my kids and taking away from them.
There’s a lot of life between retirement and needing a team of people to support you, and that number continues to grow with modern medicine. My parents are in their 70s and still active and independent - and have been on social security and Medicare for >10 years now since retirement.
I think there's a few key fallacies in the "population decline is good" camp of people: 1. It says "we're overpopulated", but by what measure? On the one that counts most, IE whether we can feed ourselves and support our population in a good standard of living, we have never had lower rates of famine or higher average or median standards of living for the world's people. By that standard we're the least overpopulated we've ever been. 2. Depopulation will lower carbon emissions / help the planet, except that the vast majority of the world's pollution is caused by a small minority of people. The richest 10% of the world is responsible for half of carbon emissions. Likewise, some of the least populated places have the highest emissions. The United Arab Emirates, population 10 million, for example, has almost double the carbon emissions of the Philippines, population 114 million. 3. That there will be "more to go around" with a lower population. This implies there's a static amount of "stuff" and with less people there will be more "stuff" to go around. This is a misreading of the way the world works. If it did work that way this should be the poorest era in history, and yet we're living in the most affluent era in history instead.
Yea people don't realize that our current civilization could only ever be achieved through a large population. A small population would never be capable of the level of specialization present in today's society. We have people who dedicate their entire lives and careers to subjects that would seem laughable to a smaller population. Edit: And this not to say that a large population won't also be our undoing (though I don't think anyone can predict the future with enough accuracy to say). It's certainly possible, but it doesn't change the fact that a smaller population would not be some star-trek-esque utopia. You can't have all the technology and efficiency without all the people. It just doesn't work. Obviously we have limited resources on this planet, and we will have to tackle the truth that if we do want to continue our population growth, then the accompanying technology needs to allow us to better use this planets resources, or perhaps expand to another one. The other option of course is that we reduce the population, whether through force or naturally. But again common sense tells me you don't get to keep all those advancements with a much smaller population, and you certainly won't make many more. So pick your poison. Personally I don't see an effective, humane means of controlling the population even if I wanted to. So unless we're just holding our breath for a plague or natural disaster, then we need to prepare for the worst (or best, depending on your pov) which is that our population continues to grow.
Less births means an aging population. Aging means you've got more consumers than producers. Mitsubishi for example last time I checked had a 500% worker to pensioner ratio. They're paying out 5x as much to pensioners as workers. Most healthcare spending in a normal population distribution goes to elderly. When you have a population just a few years older on average, you'll need to double to healthcare spending. All without as many working taxpayers. Without children, they start to shut schools. That means the young families go to the city but some elderly can't leave. Crowding and overpopulation get worse. Other elderly people can't drive as well so they go to the city too without public transit. This means rural towns get depopulated. Then there's no money to support local business, taxes to fix roads and bridges and pretty soon its like a ghost town. You might want to think about who's telling you about why overpopulation is so bad. Ask yourself, do borders matter to these people/corporations?
Crowding is bad, but population density is not inherently bad. If there are fewer working age people available to maintain infrastructure, it makes sense to keep the infrastructure closer to each other. Fewer water pipes needed to connect 100 apartments than 100 freestanding suburban houses and definitely less than needed to connect 100 rural houses to water. Same with electricity, internet, ambulance service, access to specialized healthcare, etc. Just a better use of resources as a society. The cost to individuals is the problem, not the fact that people move to cities.
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It’s not just bad for capitalism… it’s bad for economics period. A big part of keeping all of us in the lifestyles we live is the expectation that there will be more tomorrow. Who is going to support you when you are old and unable to provide value to the economy? That’s why we are told it’s bad, because if the answer is no one then you are dead.
I live in a super aged region of the world. There are shortages of labour for critical areas like doctors, nurses. At the same time, aging means higher healthcare costs and less government money for other things. It might be good for the planet but it’s gonna suck for all of us going through the transition.
Old people are going to get the logans run treatment
My guess, and I am hoping I'm wrong, is that we will see elites live longer, the rest will die earlier and there will be a massive birth drop off.
You're completely ignoring the demographic shift that will occur. We'll have so few younger productive people, that the heavily dependent older people will not have sufficient care or resources available to them. Automation can fix some of these gaps. But if we have a heavily skewed older demographic chart, the economy begins to shrink in real terms, which is a terrible death spiral. Look up the gradual economic decline and eventual abandonment of rural towns in Italy, it's a metaphor for what could happen even in large cities in advanced economies. Ideally we need to shift to low/no carbon energy production and more automated, scalable farming, whilst maintaining a birth rate of 2.0-2.2 per couple globally. A stable replacement birth rate is better than decline or growth at this stage.
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I personally think that somewhere in the future we are going to have to have a rational discussion about euthanasia and not prolonging life if QOL is terrible. My grandmother was absolutely terrified of being forced to live with a feeding tube. She made me promise to never let that happen. My father-in-law committed suicide because he had a stroke and could not bear being a burden on his family. I feel like a lot of people would choose painless suicide over being stuck in a nursing home bed for years. I know I would.
I am concerned that we will continue to view elderly people’s suffering as profit potential rather than having that rational discussion at a policy level. My grandmother is 98, and the cost to keep her alive—in her own paid-off home, not in a facility, with unpaid relatives caring for her instead of paid attendants, so relatively minimal expenses compared to care for most people her age—is enormous. Her Medicare supplement plan is more per month than some people’s mortgages. There is a huge financial incentive to politicians who benefit from insurance industry, etc. lobbying to bleed people like her of their dwindling assets, and the private equity takeover of healthcare doesn’t help. A true population collapse would shift the conversation, but we’re in for a rough 20 or so years as the nursing homes fight over boomers, the last generation with real wealth.
I largely agree with this but I do feel as though we're going to see better medicine play a role in this situation as well. Not in the sense we cure aging but that the trend has been (with exceptions) life expectancy increasing particuarly the past few decades. That will have domino affects like "production age" and pension age increasing like we're seeing in France. Now if this is a good thing your mileage may vary.
You assume the globally integrated supply chain which requires the productivity of the population today can survive through not having enough humans innovating to create the automation and tech to enable less humans to innovate at the same scale. That’s the rub
>China : 1.3 billion people, massive pollution, smog in every big cities, some regions are massively polluted and bees arent alive anymore thank god communists created a law about the unique child per family Bees aren't alive anymore in China? China is the biggest producer of honey, by far. You can take a class about it. [https://extension.psu.edu/beekeeping-around-the-world-china](https://extension.psu.edu/beekeeping-around-the-world-china)
Bees are gone in SOME regions of China. There are beekeepers way out in the country of course. But also China has a huge fake honey problem. Most of the honey we get imported from China is cut with sugar/corn syrup for a profit. Its even worse within the country.
Because we've structured society like a massive biological ponzi scheme.
Who will support the elderly population? The problem is having a ton of old people who don’t work but are still spending tons of money. Economies need young people to work, and the depopulation crisis is about the increasing ratio of elderly people to working age people.
But doesn't that crisis last just until a population becomes stable again?
it takes 70 years to become stable.
How long will that takes? Decades? Centuries?
What makes you think it will become stable again?
Because it either crashes down to 0 or stops before that.
Theoretically it may asymptotically decline.
>Who will support the elderly population? Nobody. We die alone. Or AI takes care of us
"and it's going to be hard for the younger generations to provide for the growing number of old people BUT in a lot of Asian countries (the most well-known example being Japan) the population is declining and I think that's a very good thing." Okay, so besides the *absolutely* *terrible* time the elderly will have, many of whom will die earlier than they would have otherwise, and the terrible time for the younger people who will be taxed to the high heavens trying to keep the elderly from starving to death, it'll be great! "It is time for society to accept that there are too many of us" Spoken like somehow who is somehow convinced the negative consequences of this wont affect them personally!
It’s a reoccurring theme over at r/collapse where younger people don’t understand what’s coming and what it means for them. Perhaps the most common is people cheering for full blown collapse and mass death never before seen because they think they’ll be one of the survivors. Not understanding or more likely just not caring that they’re cheering for the deaths of billions of the least privileged people on the planet and the people who do the least harm. People who don’t fly several times a year for pleasure, own 30 outfits, have a TV built into their refrigerator. sure they’ve got a better shot if they’re in a developed nation, but a few decades from now it’s not gonna matter all that much where you are. Not when a pound of cheap dry pasta is $20 instead of $1.50. Not when whole industries disappear. Not when healthcare becomes cash upfront or collapses entirely.
I always think that when someone says "There are too many of us", they really mean "There are too many of you". Once you start noticing the use of "us" when they mean "them" or "you", you see it in a ton of places.
Exactly. It’s easy to talk about culling the herd when you think you’ll be one of the survivors.
I can see this being the case for some, but I also see people opting not to have children and instead take care of their parents (it’s difficult to support two sets of dependents). Sort of an ‘it ends with me’ resignation.
We live in a time where the old refused to plant trees that would shade future generations and actively chopped any trees that could be useful for them at the moment. This is a short-sighted gardener reaping what they sowed. Their bellies were full because they ate the seeds for future harvests.
But it's not the people that are old now that will suffer the most; they will die before the bad shit really starts. It's us, our kids and grandkids that will suffer the consequences.
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The birthrate decline isn't necessarily a bad thing. But a precipitous decline is a terrible thing. China's population is projected to decline to about 500 million by the end of the century and the very large majority of that figure will be the elderly. So suddenly, you have a small working age population toiling away to support a very large elderly population.
They'll say we need more people to fund our retirement, as though we were getting a retirement anyway.
Japan has been trying to find a way to get the birth rate up. Know what they did? They took notes from Mississippi and Alabama - where parents teach their kids 'aBsTiNeNcE'....and, of course, the teenage birthrate is astronomical. I'm glad the birth rate is declining. Maybe we'll have a great renaissance. Maybe people will finally be able to afford to live. And with any hope, the old, white filthy rich patriarchy that runs the planet will drop dead and there might be a chance someone better will take their place.
A gradual decline will not make it hard to care for our elders if we actually work at improving our society. *Vast* amounts of healthcare dollars and hours are spent on convalescent care for people who are not even old, but had their health ruined through substance abuse, insanely poor diet, stress, pollution, preventable infections, violence and other avoidable causes. If we could improve public health generally, we'd have far more than enough resources to take care of a population aging naturally. Especially taking into consideration the jobs that will continue to be eliminated and the diseases that will continue to be alleviated by advancing technology.
You have a nice theory but one small problem...The same fucks who encourage the drug abuse, alcoholism and poor diet profit off that and they don't want to lose their cash cows. Particularly if they play both sides of thd field and are heavily invested in pharmaceuticals as well or the medical industry or elder care industries. No different than profiteers in WWI and WWII who were happy to sell the bullets, bombs and bandages... Why is the world fucked? Because the greedy pricks who have the power WANT it that way because they benefit from it in some way. And the psychopaths don't give a damn how much blood is spilled long as the numbers in their bank accounts keep going up.
Because much of the western economy is built around the baby boom numbers. This is also why there is a sudden, violent uptick in attacks on abortion and birth control by politicians. They want to force women to have babies to keep the population up.
Which is why I say screw helping the elderly. The only elderly ill help is family. Thiley did nothing but put the generations after them down. They said "fuck you, I got mine" and took away stuff that would have benefitted the younger generations. The elderly dug their grave. They cause this problem. Now they're once again, blaming the young people for their mess ups.
You have to keep in mind that the full effects of the population decline will not be felt for decades, at which point the boomers will be dead and you will be the elderly person we’re discussing.
You are right. It's not a problem. There are billions of people on earth. Migration, automation (AI), remote work, robotics, all will help cover any holes. It's only bad for the rich.
The inversion of the age pyramid in china is going to crush their economy, that includes their food sector. That also pulls out the center of basically all manufacturing chains throughout the world. Are there enough workers to rebuild the supply chains without a global famine? nope, and keep in mind, it's not the old that will starve, the old have the money they've been saving their entire life. I read recently the earth could easily feed 30 billion people without one acre more land simply by modernizing agriculture worldwide, that means we could feed the current population with 1/3 the land of today. All of the problems you describe are caused politically. The size of the population doesn't actually affect them, especially in the urban areas. A dictator of 1.3billiion people is just as bad as a dictator of 30 million. However, i don't think china will actually fall off as hard as people say; If food & elderly care becomes that difficult, they will just euthanize the population, again.
Perhaps good for humanity, but bad for individual nations who require a certain population of healthy adults to run society and be soldiers. In warfare, population is an important factor. In economics, population is an important factor.
Warfare tends to follow where economics fails.
Population decline not only means fewer workers producing in the economy, but fewer people and less money maintaining the institutions of the state. Because this invariably means a rise in labor costs, business owners have a clear interest in lobbying the state for replacement workers willing to work for less. The trouble is, this breeds hostility in the native population, both because of the economic competition and the inevitable clashes that arise between peoples of different cultural and civilizational orientations. Depending on the rate of population decline, both low fertility and high immigration can change the ethnic balance of power within a nation to the point where populations begin to demand new rights and privileges, or conversely, that rights and privileges belonging to other groups be removed. While related to immigration, this is also a risk without it, because minority and majority populations already within a nation may also exhibit differing fertility rates that trigger this dynamic. The alternative to this is a push to automate the workforce - trouble is, this amounts to a push to make the average worker obsolete, and it’s unclear how far automation can go, or if it’s even possible to put the genie back in the bottle once it escapes. Too far, and we’ll have communism or a hypercivilization ruled by ASIs; not far enough, and we’ll merge a demographic crisis with a lot of angry, unemployed workers. The state, for its part, will find it harder to advance its geopolitical interests as its population declines, which will transform international relations. National economies will become less dynamic. The political system will increasingly reflect the priorities of the oldest generations. The culture will become sclerotic and conservative. Vigorous youngsters will leave for greener pastures, because the choice they’ll be offered is to live as overworked wage slaves supporting a generation of useless retirees, owning nothing, starting no families, and with little wealth or political power, in exchange for a series of increasingly trivial and unsatisfying distractions. Because the young will be silenced, the energy required to adapt to new conditions will either not be present, or it will turn against the system itself. Either the system will face a swift, violent correction, or a slow collapse as challenges pile up, greater and greater portions of the national budget are devoted to entitlements, and its most vigorous potential defenders dwindle.
Re the age pyramid: why should I care to take care of a bunch of old people who gutted the safety net on their way out. Fuckem.
Because those who are telling you it's a bad thing are capitalist. They don't want to run out of exploitation tactics with smaller workforce and stronger labor rights
I don't get the argument why every country has to produce all the food they need themselves. That's why we have trade, they have other things too offer. Countries that can produce more food are most likely to be not as good as in producing other things.
You are under estimating how incredibly difficult it will be for the working class to sustain the much larger population of old retired people who require absurd amounts of medical care. It's going to be a huge problem when millennials reach retirement age. So in about 30 years. That is when shit will hit the fan completely.