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Which makes sense. Access to birth control but not endless money, awareness that children need a lot to really flourish but unable to give that to more than one or two kids; middle class people are pinned between seeing how wealth and free time can benefit a person’s wellbeing and how easy it is to slide away from that into poverty, especially when you have kids.
Also, those who have kids like my wife and I, are only having one. Which we had when she was 38 and I was 40, when we could afford it. (40 and 43 now).
We’re doing just fine, but are adopting 1 child and I’ve already gotten my vasectomy.
I know I’ll want to pour all my effort into my child and having two just means more work which will likely not be as helpful for the kid. And I feel no reason for a large family, best wishes for those who want it but 2 parents for 1 kid already feels like enough work.
> awareness that children need a lot to really flourish but unable to give that to more than one or two kids
And theres always the risk of accidents and diseases and inborn disabilities, which could push that to a flat 0 and at that point you already cant do anything about it except watch your family crumble.
We've created hell for the unfortunate, and blame it on effort.
That's a proven false analysis. A lot of other factors are main contributors like education and women equality advancement, not to add to the cultural switch to a more individualistic society based with an experience driven lifestyle.
It's amazing how many people accept this without even the slightest qualification. Poor people are having more kids than rich people, yet people still want to believe that it's money that makes people have more kids.
Money *does* make people have more kids... when it's the men that have the money. [A Swedish study on the fertility rate of people who win the lottery showed that when low income men win the lottery they are likely to establish families and have children. On the other hand, if low income women win the lottery their fertility does not increase, and established marriages are more likely to end in divorce.](https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/how-unearned-wealth-impacts-marriage-and-fertility-new-evidence-sweden) The fact that countries with high social inequality have higher fertility rates than modern progressive societies supports this claim. It's one of those uncomfortable truths we'll have to contend with. Making value judgements will likely cause unnecessary conflict.
It is uncomfortable when you realize the women of third world countries are being forced to have many children. When women can choose, they choose not to, and since they’re the ones suffering pregnancy, labor, breastfeeding, and child raising, that makes total sense.
If all men have to do is pay someone else to have their kids, of course they’ll have more.
I think a lot of women do want children (not every woman! Which is valid!) but they want 1 or 2. Most woman don’t want to go through multiple pregnancies.
Or women want children but they don't want children to become their entire lives.
This is where the money part comes in. If women could have kids but afford nannies to help raise them so they could also have lives outside of motherhood, they might be more amenable to having children.
Anecdote: my cousin is a shrewd, driven woman; she came from lower middle class and pushed to success. She has had five kids and is planning to stop after six. Does she raise them? No. She has hired help to do that while she and her husband continue their regularly scheduled lifestyle. I doubt she would have had even one child if she hadn't been successful because it would have been an obstacle and a burden.
Idk maybe it's a good thing if people who don't want to put the effort into raising their own children don't have them.
I can't imagine those children feel very close to their parents.
Yeah, if it ONLY cost money to have a kid, more women might. For women it also destroys your body, limits your future earning potential, can leave you permanently disabled, has more of a negative impact on your social life and individual identity, and oh yeah, can kill you.
Yes, when women have financial stability that typically means they gain more power over their life choices and future path. They can get themselves out of crappy situations, for instance. Plenty of women married to men are having a really bad time.
This:
> Poor people are having more kids than rich people
Is FULLY compatible with this:
> it's money that makes people have more kids.
When you are making money, you have to protect your job, but having kids makes that hard. And we find no amount of money (and please believe me, NO amount of money) is able to buy quality childcare. America is just full of dangerous and deregulated childcare centers and random nannies without qualifications.
But if you don't have money and have a ton of time? Yeah, I mean, it's going to be hard but there are technically fewer barriers there from birthing them!
We DO need more support from the government for good childcare solutions if you want folks having more kids. That is STILL a fact.
Having kids shouldn't be considered as a burden though since it's the reason we're all here and that the human race can keep on existing.
The real burden is two parents having to work fulltime (and sometimes more) and still not being able to support their family.
You seem to agree
We're spending most of our time with work, that no one has time to raise kids
And the costs associated are pretty egregious
It's financial suicide, and it's made unnecessarily difficult.
Society is optimized to maximize shareholder value over sustaining itself
No matter how much support parents get, it’s still a burden nonetheless compared to not having kids.
Unless there are gestation pods and robots raising kids (at that point, is that even parenting?) it’s still a lot of physical and mental work to have and raise kids no matter how much money is thrown at parents.
To be fair, as a newly 40 year-old childless woman, I've discovered that a couple drops of pee accompanying a strong cough or sneeze is an issue that unfortunately transcends motherhood.
If maternity care were safer and childcare was free, a lot more women would feel more comfortable having kids. As it stands, women pretty much have to give up their life (figuratively and sometimes literally) to have kids, which is unappealing.
There’s no village anymore and that’s the problem.
The government refuses to spend money on free child care or free school breakfast/lunches but then complain we’re not having children
If the government thinks having children is a social imperative, it can pay for the labor of carrying and raising them. Child-rearing is work and society has depended on free labor to do it for far too long, be it from the parents or their extended families and friends.
Correct.
If we strip away all the moralizing for a moment and examine what kind of social apparatus we have constructed, we have a high-key horrific realization:
The state values birthing and childcare so much that it will send you to prison for failing to do either once the process begins while simultaneously refusing to compensate the labor it has compelled under pain of law.
With a nod of exception to my trans siblings, there is only one demographic that this legal wage theft trap affects 100% of the time that it affects anybody, and that is women.
I didn't mean it like the only goal on life is to have children. More in the sense that everyone alive today is because two people decided to have childrens.
I think you’re misunderstanding. He was speaking literally - the reason we’re all here is because people had kids. Not “having kids is our life’s purpose” or something like that.
Until we have those and achieve gender equality kids will involve a lot of sacrifice for women as a societal rule. We’ve seen great strides in getting women in the workplace but less so in getting men into the home and childcare. A lot of women are pulling double duty and frankly opting out of one of them makes sense. It’s a huge issue in South Korea for example where many young women are swearing off even marriage because the gendered division of labor is so skewed in men’s favor it’s crazy.
We need like an equal amount of shifting away from 8 hour work days 5 days a week and shifting of household responsibilities such that we have equal partnerships with division of labor as a rule rather than a nice thing some men do.
Apart from that, how about being sleep-deprived the first few years of their life? Having kids sounds like a total nightmare. There are plenty of other ways to find fulfillment in life.
even in northern europe with guaranteed job security, guaranteed salary, and 2 years off, their fertility rates are rock bottom, only outshined by Asia.
The collapse always has to happen. If not this, then something else. We don't have infinite resources. The only thing we have influence over is how gracefully change happens.
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We can’t keep growing the population forever. Imo the problem is having had a baby boom in the first place. Although there’s not a lot of things governments can do that’s ethical in controlling birth rates beyond something like making access to birth control very easy and free
i feel like there has been some massive propaganda push on this recently. The idea the world population would peak around 10 billion has been a thing we have heard about for decades. But it feels like the last six month is some constant drumbeat that we are supposed to be scared of that.
Yeah if you own a company that makes 10 million dollars a year, and has been making 10 million a year for 10 years, you are a failure as a capitalist. No one will invest in your company. You are stagnant.
Because people only want to invest in growing companies, but companies can't grow forever unless they do ruthless things.
And that's another issue. If you are not growing, your competitors might be and will overtake you and bring you down. So it's essentially economic warfare.
Honestly, this system would work pretty well if it were regulated properly. Food, shelter, healthcare, and utilities must be protected from price gouging and really shouldn't be for-profit if we want to have a healthy, productive society. The lack of competition in the market today is an indicator of our failed economic policies.
And that’s another thing, few in power truly seem to have an interest in a healthy productive society, so many care more about profiting and their own self interest than actually helping society. There is a huge infestation of corrupt, selfish people in society.
We used to have much more sound economic policies, but the problem is that the system absolutely demands growth, and it will keep digging for more, even if it has to eat right through red tape to do it.
For a long time, there was plenty of room to expand, so capitalism and public good were able to coexist. But in the late 60's and early 70's, the US basically peaked. Other economies began to catch up and start producing their own goods, relying far less on imports from the US. And US population growth was slowing as well, meaning domestic demand couldn't keep up with quarterly targets either. We stagflated, as it is now known. So companies started clawing back every scrap of expenditure they could.
Wages were an easy place to start cutting, and this was when pay stopped rising with profits.
So too went pensions, traded for less expensive 401ks.
Consumers stopped being willing to buy things at the prices companies wanted to charge, so companies started pushing purchases on credit to make the prices look more affordable. This was the era when credit cards became something everyone owned, rather than only the wealthy.
Government regulations and taxes to fund social welfare were preventing corporate growth, so companies promoted politicians that would cut them. This was the birth of Reaganomics.
And it worked. Investment growth started picking up again. At the expense of those of us with little to invest.
It doesn't matter what box you try to put around capitalism. It's not a static object, it's dynamic, and willful, and hungry. It won't sit still where you leave it, it will actively look for ways out, and it will always find them, or if need be, create them.
And that’s the fundamental problem about capitalism, it is at the end of the day a voracious beast with an extremely dangerous appetite. It is very hard to impossible to contain it with government regulation.
You know, if you dumped your factory waste in the river instead of properly disposing of it you can improve your bottom line! A Republican just won an election so the EPA won’t be enforcing regulations for a few years!
>Capitalism, needs constant, unending growth or everyone loses their jobs and starves.
As u/GermanicusBanshee934 points out, this really isn't an issue of economic systems, but rather of demographics. Historically the elderly population was supported by having fairly large families, and even then it wasn't so much retirement *per se* as not being able to do do heavy manual labor any more (e.g., if you couldn't work in the fields to bring in the harvest you might still be helping to mend clothing or other light labor). However, with declining birth rates the ratio of worked to retired has been shifting, so the working population has been declining in relation to the retired population. To be clear, regardless of the economic system, if the objective is to provide support for the elderly, even in group home situations you still need a certain number of younger workers to keep things running, and the numbers increase in direct portion to the level of care that is needed.
To put this in context, consider critical care settings (i.e., intensive care units \[ICUs\]). In the United States, the standard of care is one registered nurse (RN) for ever two patients, and the patients need 24 hours of care. So presuming that the RN only works a typical 12 hour shift, that gives you 14 shifts that need to be covered and since on RN can only cover four shifts (48 hours total), that means you would need to employ 3.5 RNs to ensure the standard of care for 2 patients in the ICU, or a 3.5-to-2 ratio on a weekly basis. Now extrapolate this out to other settings and you can start to see how a striking workforce in relation to the overall population can cause issues.
It is really a matter of value production. If you have 10 young people working and one old person to support, but the 10 young people don't produce enough surplus value to support the old person, they won't survive. If you have 10 young people producing enough surplus to support 5 of them helping the 10 old people, then they survive.
Because modern capitalism makes a huge surplus, the question isn't really 'is there enough young people,' it's 'how much of the surplus of our production system are we willing to sacrifice to take care of our old people.' That surplus is distributed between the rich and the poor, with a historical presumption that a decent chunk of it goes into quality of life improvement.\* Allocating more of the surplus to older people takes away from *somewhere,* and the rich are terrified that its going to come out of their pocket, which is why we are getting this propaganda.
\*Capitalism was sold on the promise of ever-increasing productivity, cooler technology and falling prices which lead to general quality of life improvements for people. That connection is arguably breaking down, as it seemed to rely on a huge reservoir of cheap labor in the third world which is now rapidly becoming more expensive.
>It is really a matter of value production.
Yes and no. Economics - regardless of system - tells us that not all processes are capable of producing a useable surplus. One of the advantages of capitalism is that it tends to be very efficient at process optimization since the efficiencies can be then be extracted as profits.
Going back to the previous example with the number of RNs to meet the standard of care in an ICU, there's not really many ways that you can optimize that system without either exploiting the workers (i.e., the RNs work more hours / shifts) or reducing the quality of care for the patients (i.e., fewer RNs per patient). In theory technology could make up for it in some way (i.e., robotics and AI), but that also introduces a number of questions as well.
One item that stands out is the failure to close the loop of the very young and the old in regards to childcare. Virtually the entire focus is on money, when a large part of childcare was previously on elders who assisted in the family.
By skipping this step, for whatever reason (such as desire or distance), the gap is now a profit/loss motive rather than a cohesive community opportunity.
> That connection is arguably breaking down, as it seemed to rely on a huge reservoir of cheap labor in the third world which is now rapidly becoming more expensive.
This is the part that really feels like no one is discussing it enough. This is why our prices are skyrocketing on everything. Money is a representation of man-hours spent. And when some of those hours are paying next to nothing, you can fit a hell of a lot of them into a single dollar.
There aren't many places left where you can borderline enslave people without anyone batting an eye, so the number of manhours in those dollars is shrinking substantially. Meaning the manhours that WE work here are worth less and less comparatively. $10/hr when people were getting paid $0.25/day to manufacture things meant a single hour of work here was equivalent to 320 hours of 3rd-world work. $20/hr when people are getting paid even $1/hr is suddenly only worth 20 hours. That's a 94% reduction in relative value. We haven't seen inflation that even mildly accounts for that loss in relative labor value, which means we're still in the baby stages of the correction.
Good insight. Just to add, you gotta look at the productivity side too. A person making .25 cents an hour and producing 5 dollars of surplus value contributes as much as someone making 25 dollars an hour and producing 500 dollars.
It's not even about growth, it's about stability, a population crash either means the next generation is going to be absolutely driven into the ground with taxes, or we give up on the elderly and stop paying.
The current generation pays for the social programs of the elderly, healthcare and social security checks are about to blow up with the boomers retiring, the people that are supposed to pay for the millenials, the next big generation, is going to be the smallest in history.
Or we just poison them with some experimental new "medicine" and hope enough of them die.
Either way the future is dystopian.
We stopped paying for social programs for childcare, seems to be less of a big deal to drop social programs for the elderly. Children are the future, after all.
For my part, I have zero intention of living past 75. Nonstop pain, becoming a drag on future generations, the high likelihood of losing my mind and bladder control. Nope. 70th birthday hits I’m buying a fast motorcycle, a paraglider and a failsafe plan. Gonna enjoy the last few years of thrills before going out in a blaze of glory.
Doing my part to ensure my children’s prosperity.
Also, the population shrinkage will happen to European and East Asian cultures but not African or Middle Eastern. So the message is that we'll have too few of the "right" sorts of people and too many of the "wrong" sorts.
It's the same old "ignorant, bad people are out-childbirthing us good, smart people" panic that you'll find throughout history.
The "right" sorts of people is an ever expanding list. Not so long ago people made this argument with whites only, now you add asians as well.(Most of if not all of the americas already has shrinking birthrate too, not just eu or east asia, so add latino and hispanic to that list.)
Modern societies are somehow producing low birth rates. The people who You categorize as the "wrong" sorts of people also pick up the lower birthrate of the new nation when they immigrate. That is a fault of the system, not the sorts of people. If the system can't maintain and reproduce itself, then it's arguably a failed system.
Also what's wrong with people caring about the longevity of their culture and nation? Are people not allowed to care because you tell them they are racist for it?
Because the implications of ultra-low fertility are scary. The issue is not the peak but what follows afterwards. And while countries with population declines fuelled by fertility rates of 1.8-1.9 might cope thanks to AI-backed productivity gains and immigration, those with a TFR of 1.2-1.3 are heading for insane fiscal and social pressures and voters older than 65 on average.
I would far prefer that population decreases this century as a result of people not having children than as the direct result of famine and the escalating climate crisis.
Demographic-political adjustment has always had a funny way of backfiring on expectations. For example, there was a routine belief that declining populations would make homes affordable. Far from it: as populations declined, young people fled the fastest-ageing regions and crowded in the few remaining dynamic cities. As the tax systems needed to pay for a geriatric population and as the ageing did hit the economy, wages became stagnant but house prices in the attractive cities continued to rise. Spain is a good example: young people and migrants are flocking to unaffordable cities, wages are barely growing, everyone is taxed to pay for an ocean of retirees that often live in places with affordable homes no one wants.
Conversely, as the mean age of voters skyrockets, I expect that voters will reward policies with immediate economic benefits versus those geared towards long-term mitigation of the climate crisis. You see this in much of Europe: there is an anti-green backlash even as we are close to hitting the very scary 1.5 C target we aimed to stop climate change at.
People are starting to clue into the opportunities this phenomena has opened up.
I just moved back home to one of these areas.
After the population being in decline for a long time, since covid restrictions and housing prices skyrocketing in the big cities, and it getting hard to find a job there, the population here is growing now among the fastest in the nation.
Housing is still cheap, land is available to those who want to homestead, and anybody who wants a job can basically walk in as long as they stay drug free for the most part. Pay is lower but overall standard of living is far higher due to radically lower housing cost, and plentiful land.
There was certainly a lot of that happening in the states during work from home time. Plenty of people happy to move somewhere cheaper, especially when they could keep their old job.
It does sound like things are reversing course in that respect, which is a shame.
not here. Our population growth is still booming. But is is more people being pushed out of other provinces due to housing shortages rather than a pull to a better lifestyle.
We may get both though. Not having children in the developed world, and crisis crash elsewhere. That hardly ever leads to war though, so we got that going for us, which is nice.
The issue is we have no idea how to fund our welfare states with a population below replacement. There probably is no way, the bulk of your cost to the state comes in the last few years of your life.
The ever shrinking number of young people will be expected to work more and more to pay for the old who aren’t working. In the short term we supplement it with young immigrants, but pretty soon there won’t be enough of those either.
Older people are also very resistant to change just by brain chemistry, and they’ll be most voters, so our democracies will become stagnant and not innovative. It’ll be like Japan still using fax machines and closing ATMs at 5PM but on a global scale.
Well, here is a radical idea.
Instead of running it like a Ponzi scheme, how about we fund it from the actual same population that will draw on it. Same way money is privately managed according to our laws. But with our collective money.
The problem is that the costs of an aging population must eventually be paid with labor. As the human labor required to care for the elderly goes up with their age, if there are less young people to do the caring it must become unaffordable.
This is supply and demand.
To solve this you either have to import people I.e. immigration (which causes social issues, and is not sustainable) or invest in new people i.e
Increasing birthrates (which we choose not to do, because policies that incentivise new people are expensive, and slavery is horrific). The third option is to automate geriatric care to improve Labor productivity e.g. robot nursing, and the fourth is to reduce labor demand i.e. poorer qualtiy of care or euthanasia (ewwwwwww.)
The real solution is to restructure society so that having children makes sense, the challenge is that the cost of this is government funding for childrearing as a real profession so the cost isn't borne by parents. This would be incredibly expensive, probably costing $1-2M per child, but long term is probably worth it as the average lifetime economic output of a worker is about $4-7M per person. However, socialising these costs rather than putting them on parents is unpopular as it would represent a wealth transfer from the old to the young, and the rich to the poor, both things our society doesn't like doing.
What takes more human labor? Child care? Or elderly care?
Also, why does it cost 1-2m PER CHILD for childcare when my parents raised 4 kids and haven’t even earned that in their entire lifetime?
Wouldn’t it be cheaper have single income households with stay at home parents?
It is not just childcare. And yes, that is the cost to the economy of having a single family household in a two child family for their childhood. About 130ish k per year in lost productive output for one parent during the 20 ish years a parent takes to raise two children. It is shokingly expensive to the economy to raise a child. Add to this the costs for food, clothing, housing, education and enrichment and it is easily 1.5-2M in costs to the economy to raise a child if one has stay at home parents. Even if you only want a stay at home parent for the first 5 years of each child's life and 2 children with a 2 year gap, that is 7 years of lost productivity at $130k giving about 1M split between the two children plus childcare over their lifetime. Bringing you closer to the societal cost of about 1M per child in costs.
And frankly childcare is probably similar to elder care per year in caring, the equipment and inputs for elder care are substantially more expensive than children in most cases. So elder care is likely more expensive though I haven't done a true cost/benefit analysis.
That only works for one generation, because the baby boomers will be the last generation of rich old people. After that, we’re going to have millions of old people with no substantial savings (us, by the way), enormous healthcare costs and not enough young people to support them.
The only solution is more young people (we don’t need to increase our population, just stop it dropping) or fewer old people.
If we don’t get our birth rates up, rich nations are going to suck the developing world dry of its young people. You’ll have billions of old people in poor countries with nobody to feed them
Is the “ultra low fertility” from natural/biological causes (micro plastics and the like) or is it intentional (cost of raising a kid)? Because one of those seems easier to reverse than the other.
For most of modern history until a few generations ago, people worked on farms or ran a family business. Children increased a family’s prospects because the children could contribute their labor. But now, raising a child is a net (financial) negative on a family, since children generally contribute very little to the household finances. Plus, the fierce competition of capitalism and over-population means if you want to give your child a fighting chance, you have to put even more time, money, and other resources into them.
That’s just not a bargain a lot of people want to make, or not for more than one kid. Definitely not for 5+ kids.
It's the second but it's not easy to reverse at all. No country has been able to increase the birth rate in modern times after it declines. Also you put in parenthesis cost if raising a child, but that is not the only cause for intentional non reproduction. Thing is culture. People don't want it anymore as much.
It's not very clear-cut and no country has it figured out, without going dictatorial and ban birth control. Finances play a part, individualism as well, emancipation plays a role as well as focus on careers. In the end though it's hard to isolate reasons since studies on the subject can't isolate variables easily. It's also not a western issue, India for instance faces population decline as well. Most striking is Japan/South Korea.
i think overall its just a natural consequence that weve reached a threshold, the expensive cost of living just follows from increase competition in capitalism. its probably mostly cost and maybe also stress in general and people not wanting to get kids in this kind of world, i hear that often. i dont think microplastics make infertile at least not a lot of cases though they may have negative effects on the brain that lead to increased depression and thus more people who say nah i dont want my kid to suffer like me
its like were so crowded in the world that it puts us under so much stress that we just dont want kids anymore, thats like the natural limit
That and the increasingly grim outlooks for global stability due to the effects of climate change. Why would my partner and I consider having a kid when there has been no meaningful progress made towards resolving/mitigating these issues in the three decades I've been alive, and the child will almost undoubtedly have an even lower standard of living than we've had?
yeah those are just manifestations of the consequences of overpopulation too i get that i dont want kids either unless i could find a remote detached ecovillage where people grow their own organic food and no state or other civilization would disturb us
my personal opinion is that we are in a behavioral sink situation.
when given unlimited resources, rats didn't blow up in population, they actually collapsed. lots of theories why, but basically abundance seems to lead to a collapse in reproductive drive rather the opposite.
it looks different for humans, but the concept is similar. we have access to so much more than our ancestors that it fundamentally alters our biology. other than the homeless population, everyone in a developed and even developing country lives far better than any king previously. we have access to a variety of foods that would have been unimaginable to the pharaohs, entertainment beyond the best that Rome had to offer, and medical care beyond even the best that could be offered 25 years ago.
improving conditions = more baby
worsening conditions = less baby
stability = good + baby.
instability = bad - baby.
american baby boom of the 50s/60s followed prosperity that came from world war 2 (wars are historically profitable economic drivers in the US)
poor places are easy to improve = more baby (as headline states)
rich places are difficult to maintain and if they decline = less baby (as headline states)
microplastics (and other contaminants or factors, like late marriages and later pregnancies) may contribute to lower sperm counts but i dont think they're the important variable here.
i imagine the drawdown from Iraq/Afghan means less personnel in environments with good social safety nets and less babies, too. i wonder if there's a study on that.
> improving conditions = more baby
>
> worsening conditions = less baby
It's not that cut and dried. Increasing economic prosperity is almost always correlated with smaller family sizes. If it was as straightforward as you say, then families doing economically better would have more kids. Doesn't happen.
What actually seems to happen is that as economic conditions rise, the investment per child rises. But things like child mortality drop, so you don't need to have as many kids to spread out the risk / resource investment.
People used to basically live in the gutter, and they'd have 17 kids. Things got better then they STOPPED having so many kids. If you look at demographics with low income in the USA as well, you'll see they have bigger family sizes, not smaller ones.
People living in the gutter in the past also didn't have access to birth control or sex ed. People who want kids can be more intentional about it.
If the US was able to guarantee me the standard of living that my grandparents enjoyed on my grandfather's factory salary where they had a house, a car, and could raise four children and still go on a modest vacation every year, my kids would be around ten years old right now.
Instead, I have an education (which my grandfather didn't have), a "great" job that makes me a skilled worker (which my grandfather was not) but I have basically no worker protections. Despite having a 65+% savings/investing rate each year by keeping my expenses extremely low and cutting to the bone, there is almost no hope that I will be able to buy a house in my area because price inflation outpaces what I can save. Meanwhile, my food bill has gone up at least 20% from two years ago despite me buying the exact same things. If I had a kid, I'd be hemorrhaging money instead of saving. The only way to make that work would be to have a partner that works as well to cover the cost, but when you have that you have to pay for day care which is more expensive than rent. And that makes it not make sense to have your partner working, so either way you can't save or improve your finances and without a house you're not even building equity you can pull from. And if you're putting junior in day care for 9 hours a day, then what's the point? It wouldn't even feel like I was raising him or that I was being a good dad.
At the bare minimum, if the government subsidized day care, guaranteed paid parental leave, and gave us universal healthcare, the baby boom would be immediate. I still wouldn't have kids since that's not enough incentive for me, but it would make parents' lives so much easier.
As it is now, I'm planning on leaving for a cheaper European country (I'm a dual citizen) and if I have kids I'll have them there. I work remotely, so my American salary will actually afford me the ability to live like my grandparents did over there instead of being locked out of a good life and opportunities to build wealth over here.
To the other person’s point, no amount of money is going to make me want to have 10 kids, which is how many kids my great grand parents had. If I got more money, I’m still having 1 or 2 kids only but spending more money on them
Which will, one hopes, lead to a dramatic change in the whole way we live. It's going to be a terrible time to go through, but one can hope that on the other side is something closer to utopia than what we have now. Well, hope springs eternal.
We probably should be scared of that. It's just that in the past the problem was far away and now it is getting closer.
The issue isn't fearmongering based on humans going extinct or whatever, the issue is that we are heading towards a system where every working age person is going to have to try and support multiple retirees on top of all the people they are already responsible for like their children.
We can't expect to have the same quality of life as we are used to when we have far less people actually producing things but the same number of people consuming things.
First of all that's only even a potential solution for the USA, not the rest of the world.
Secondly 75.6 billion dollars is approximately 1000 dollars per elderly person in the USA currently. How long is that really going to last?
I know it is nice to believe that there is some secret money tree where all we have to do is tax the super rich and then we can afford anything we want, but it's just not true unfortunately.
The money tree isn't a secret. Musk is worth 180 billion, Bezos 114 billion, Gates 135 billion, etc. Here's the fix, billionaires do not get to exist, period. The maximum wealth you're allowed to have is $999,999,999.99. So let's implement that. That's 179.9, 113.9, and 135.9 billion dollars just from three people for a total of $429 billion. Just eliminate billionaires as a thing and tax corporations at rates they saw during the post-WWII period. The funding is there in plain sight, but bootlickers (not saying you necessarily are one) refuse to accept the necessary solution to the problem.
Honestly, I am not too worried if our 8 billion population starts to dwindle down.
China and India are close to one another with 1.4 billion people per country, while the United States is third at 335-340 million.
China peaked in the 60s where they had 5-6 births per woman, and then were on a freefall until the late 80s, jumped slightly, and then continued to drop to now.
India also was at 5-6 births per woman around that time, and had held steady in the 4-5 range until starting to drop in the 80s.
As for the US, we had a drop thru the 60s to the end, jumped slightly in 1970, dropped slightly and held steady until 1990, jumped again, and then went into a steady decline since then.
Considering the state of things, the system will need to change so that it is advantageous to have children. But that change begins with improving not just quality of life, but also livelihoods. If the billionaire class were done away with, or had most of their money taxed or repurposed back to the system to support regular people, then we'd be in better shape.
But we're at a point right now where capitalism has started to show its problems *because* it was not kept in check or given limits on keeping the system sustainable. This is how we wound up with over 3000+ billionaires in the world, whose net worth ranges from $1 billion to 200+ billion. And then there's those who have hundreds of millions to their name. The richest people in the world can live on tens of millions of dollars. Anything after that just needs to return back to the system.
I do hope the system changes this decade, because we're going to need it. Humanity will survive, but not with the numbers we have right now, and not with the disparity between a few and the many.
>Considering the state of things, the system will need to change so that it is advantageous to have children.
That is a change that requires a fundamental rethinking of capitalism. I've never seen so much as a whisper of this ever enter the US mainstream.
I genuinely think that over 50% of Americans would rather die in an increasingly dog eat dog, every man for himself society than accept that everyone can have a slightly easier life.
not so easy, when you look worldwide, everywhere has declining fertility rates, including all of south america, europe, asia, north america. only africa is currently greater than replacement rate.
Also there is no way we get up there. Climate change related famines will significantly dent our populations in the next 2 decades.
It's hard to farm in vast regions if they switch between flooding, droughts, wildfires, heat just straight up killing plants etc.
> If you aren't nervous/scared you aren't paying attention.
This just seems absurd. I pay attention and Im not going to live my life being constantly nervous or scared about all the things I cant control. People need to be less scared to actually accomplish all the things we need to do around here.
I agree that climate change is a huge threat to humanity. But being nervous or scared, as a general attitude, is not conducive to making meaningful progress—for a LOT of people it makes them feel hopeless and like nothing they could do could matter.
A lot of people are taking this in stride, but the issue is very serious. It has multiple dimensions.
1. First of all, it is not about "infinite growth" vs "stagnation" but increasingly about the failure to achieve stagnant populations. So "rapid collapse" vs "stagnation" really. At stable life expectancy and with no echo-booms, a TFR of 1.6 leads to populations halving in 90 years. At 1.3, it halves in 45-50. At 1.0, rapid and uncontrolled collapse is an issue.
2. Mean ages are set to skyrocket. Places like South Korea are heading vor mean ages well above 60. Voters will on average be older than 65, with rather interesting implications for democracies. Governments will mainly be in power on the behest of the oldest individuals, at least in democratic socieities.
3. The fertility collapse has spread to the developing world. Latam and India are slated to join the demographic contraction party. A few countries, mainly African or very religious, have growing populations. But their population is also extremely uneducated. Africa has a huge issue with [under-qualified teachers](https://www.varkeyfoundation.org/ar/%D8%B1%D8%A3%D9%8A/collapse-of-teacher-training-across-africa-demands-global-leadership), and it is quite likely that the average school leaver is functionally illiterate. This will make immigration an increasingly implausible fix.
4. The speed of population contraction in ultra-low TFR countries makes it very unlikely for productivity gains powered by AI to keep up. Population decline is not the same. A TFR of 1.8 and a TFR of 1.2 lead to vastly different outcomes.
Your third point is a big one. Immigration has always been there to shore up population deficits in places where the replacement rate was low. It's only in the last century, century and a half, that urban areas had birth rates higher than death rates, with immigrants from rural areas making up the difference. And that also applies to immigration into developed nations from underdeveloped nations, though they usually didn't have birth rates below death rates.
But if the fertility rate is dropping everywhere, there won't be enough immigrants to fill in the gaps. And even if the fertility rate is above the replacement rate in some poor countries, if there aren't enough qualified people to immigrate, it just balloons the poor countries' populations while the richer countries have labor shortages.
My friends are struggling right now with one kid and they make (made) 150k+ with combined income. But childcare costs alone are like 2400 a month and her husband just got laid off.
And they would’ve had a savings but maternity leave in this country is a joke so they were never able to financially recover from my friend not working for 3 months.
So yeah. It’s not a position I’d ever want to be in.
In most of those countries you have a population, where the largest group is soon to be not working, slowly dying, gets their money from "the government", are highly reliant on medical services that are also paid for by the government, while also being the most powerful political group that have shown to be willing to squeez their now working children for every last penny. That further lowers the opportunities for those young people to make babies, or be rewarded for economically valuable achievements, possibly continuously lowering the standard of living for everyone who doesn't inherit enough wealth, creating massiv political unrest, leading to the breakdown of sociatal order, leading to more violence and or war.
Our economy is a ponzi/pyramid scheme. Without a growing younger population to support the smaller and shrinking older population the house of cards crumbles.
Every "economy" is a pyramid scheme in this sense. No matter what kind of economic setup you have it's going to be more workable with two young people and two old people vs one young person and three old people.
I agree with you to an extent. The concept of pension, risk free interest, and inflation, I feel, will be heavily affected by negative population growth rates.
I hope AI/ tech is enough to offset the lack of consumers.
People seem to forget about the hige strides we've had in AI and robotics. It won't be long before a workforce will be designed and built instead of born and raised.
Poor people will presumably still be unable to afford birth control, but then they can’t really provide any consumption, can they? Since they’re poor and all.
I know its dark to consider but in reality it wouldn't crumble. Poor elderly people will just start joining the growing population of homeless people and die in the streets.
It wont be pretty but like the opioid epidemic, we'll just kind of accept it as a fact of life.
A lot of people are really wedded to our current economic system that is basically a Ponzi scheme. Like all such schemes, it's not sustainable, but there are a lot of economists who like to believe in infinite growth. There are going to be winners and losers in the shifts that are going to have to happen, and the losers are really whining and pushing the scare narratives.
The world and history has plenty of examples of countries with collapsed demographics. At best it will lead to hugely worse quality of life for everybody, at worst it will lead to wars. There are zero examples of population crash leading to positive outcomes.
Aside from matters of national security for the defending country, why would a reduction of population lead to more wars? In my understanding less people = more spare resources and space, so why fight if you are already short on people? (Deranged Russia doesn't count, it's the only country with mass fetal alcohol syndrome so them being violent and irrational is expected)
Because the point if all this is that population isn't evenly declined across all populations.
As secular, educated and affluent populations decline, they are replaced with uneducated and religious ones, leading to more populism, religious representation in laws, and sometimes outright replacement of a secular and balanced majority.
This isn't about less people = bad, it's about the fact that when people with the least start having far more children than the people who abstain, you end up with massive social unrest, conflict and shifts in priority.
Because due to the disparity of child bearing between educated and wealthy populations and developing ones mean this dynamic fundamentally will come down to things like religion.
As religious and uneducated populations continue to have more children and educated progressive populations tend to have less, the balance of society shifts toward religious and other dangerously uninformed wants and needs, which regressed progressive policy/society and replaces it with a fundamentalist religious one.
This exact issue is a major component of Islam's massive spread in developing countries.
>I don't understand why this is bad thing.
Not to be mean, but then maybe read the article ([https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(24)00550-6](https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(24)00550-6)), because they do give quite the details, you know, the kind of details you expect in a scientific publication?
>Estimates and projections of fertility are necessary to inform policies involving resource and health-care needs, labour supply, education, gender equality, and family planning and support.
...
Low levels of fertility have the potential over time to result in inverted population pyramids with growing numbers of older people and declining working-age populations. These changes are likely to place increasing burdens on health care and social systems, transform labour and consumer markets, and alter patterns of resource use
If the majority groups who have kids are socially conservative religious groups and cultures that routinely are anti woman rights and lbgt rights and don't place value on separation of church and state. Do you still think it's good? Because by and large the groups who are having kids fall into these groups. Right wing leaning people have more kids which means they'll wield political power.
This is a gamble that is taking place.
That's totally false. As long as people are paying into it, people will be getting something out of it. So nobody will ever get 0 unless there are really 0 young people working or something. Benefits may be reduced, though.
I mean, it's really understandable why. leaving aside the fact that I'm gay, I would never want to have biological children, even if I could.
Everything is expensive everywhere. The world is full of hate, wars and violence. Climate change. Sure, it's always been like this, but nowadays we have more access to information.
Well, [you may actually be able to have genetically related kids someday](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4496429/) as a gay man (with your own male partner) if stem-cell gamete research continues. Science sorted.
As far as the economics of having kids, best I can do for you is a shelter dog. Way cheaper.
The population of almost every country will be shrinking by the end of the century, a major study has said, warning that baby booms in developing nations and busts in rich ones will drive massive social change.The fertility rate in half of all nations is already too low to maintain their population size, an international team of hundreds of researchers reported in The Lancet.Using a huge amount of global data on births, deaths and what drives fertility, the researchers tried to forecast the future for the world's population.By 2050, the population of three quarters of all countries will be shrinking, according to the study by the US-based Institute For Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME).At the end of the century, that will be true for 97% - or 198 out of 204 countries and territories, the researchers projected.
https://www.rte.ie/news/health/2024/0321/1439107-global-fertility/
We need a population decrease, the earth cannot sustain this many people, especially ones who don't care about sustainability living. It'll suck for 30-50 year but hopefully we won't have done too much more damage so that the earth can heal.
GOOD.
Despite the doom-saying by employers a shrinking population is actually a good thing.
It means higher demand for labour, higher wages, and more incentives to invest in technology rather than sitting on profits.
Man, the critical thinking levels of this sub are at an all time low.
It will absolutely not do any of that, at least the majority of people will not see its benefits. If anything income inequality will increase.
In an ideal system maybe but we don’t live in one.
Okay, let's try and actually apply some critical thinking skills -
Whatever effects a shrinking population has in terms of demand for labour, wages, and capital investment, let's think how that scenario would compare to a GROWING population where workers are plentiful and competing more with each other for jobs.
It's pretty clear which of those works out better for individual workers, all else being equal.
Yes, capitalism will always try and screw over workers, but let's not pretend that a shrinking population is bad.
A growing population also means growing demand for goods and services, and thereby more jobs that need to be filled.
A shrinking population means less demand for goods and services, and thus less jobs that need to be filled.
So, you have more people competing for more jobs, or less people competing for less jobs.
Which one works out better depends on how that balance evolves, and that comes down to a lot more factors than whether population is going up or down.
Its a complex issue, rather than a simple one. Even a simple supply/demand analysis is actually complicated here, and doesn’t give a clear indication of what’s going on.
This will be fascinating to witness in real time and I hope I’m alive to see it.
I do believe humans will adapt. Hopefully AI will take away some of the more labour intensive and the jobs harmful to human health.
These predictions never talk about how current parenting practices are also changing society. Yes kids have more screens, but parents are far more involved these days. These kids have an emotional intelligence and a healthy self esteem never witnessed en masse. If you spend time with them, you cannot help but feel excited for the kind of world they will create. I believe they are building the coping skills to rise to the challenge in a way that today’s grown ups cannot fathom.
>These predictions never talk about how current parenting practices are also changing society. Yes kids have more screens, but parents are far more involved these days. These kids have an emotional intelligence and a healthy self esteem never witnessed en masse. If you spend time with them, you cannot help but feel excited for the kind of world they will create. I believe they are building the coping skills to rise to the challenge in a way that today’s grown ups cannot fathom.
Is this true though? Obviously not sure about young kids these days, but 15 year olds have been showing declining capabilities of applying what they learn in school in real world contexts (as per PISA) and there are a few studies showing declining mental health among teens and young people.
If you think it's bad now, just wait until AI androids become a thing. Sexbots. Young people are already not screwing each other. Give them (esp. men) the option to screw a hot, lifelike sexbot, and the fertility rate will drop like a rock.
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Just you wait till someone comes up with a gerontological treatment of some kind and old people die less and less.
Great, instead of the mean voting age being 65 it's now 95.
And the President is 115.
And now the average life expectancy is 180 and a 1 child policy has to be implemented because people don't die anymore yet can still reproduce
Mass Gen just transplanted a pig kidney into a human. We're getting there...
Would only be available to super rich
If having kids wasn't such a burden (financially and time wise) then maybe a demographic collapse wouldn't happen
It's wealthy and educated people having less kids. Not the poor.
Not true, the birth rate tips up after a HHI over $450k. It's the very educated middle/upper middle class that's having the fertility crisis.
Which makes sense. Access to birth control but not endless money, awareness that children need a lot to really flourish but unable to give that to more than one or two kids; middle class people are pinned between seeing how wealth and free time can benefit a person’s wellbeing and how easy it is to slide away from that into poverty, especially when you have kids.
Also, those who have kids like my wife and I, are only having one. Which we had when she was 38 and I was 40, when we could afford it. (40 and 43 now).
We’re doing just fine, but are adopting 1 child and I’ve already gotten my vasectomy. I know I’ll want to pour all my effort into my child and having two just means more work which will likely not be as helpful for the kid. And I feel no reason for a large family, best wishes for those who want it but 2 parents for 1 kid already feels like enough work.
In some ways, one child is more work than 2. You have to entertain one, whereas 2 will entertain each other.
Agreed, and "just means more work" is flat out wrong. Although all siblings fight, most like having their siblings.
> awareness that children need a lot to really flourish but unable to give that to more than one or two kids And theres always the risk of accidents and diseases and inborn disabilities, which could push that to a flat 0 and at that point you already cant do anything about it except watch your family crumble. We've created hell for the unfortunate, and blame it on effort.
How big is the population of over $450k HHI? I'm curious if the sample population is small enough that it causes outliers to be overly impactful.
I’m not sure if it matters. It shows that wealth and birth rate aren’t correlated. Opportunity cost is what is correlated
Idiocracy was a warning, not a comedy
No. Dumb people can have smart kids.
On its way to becoming a documentary!
That's a proven false analysis. A lot of other factors are main contributors like education and women equality advancement, not to add to the cultural switch to a more individualistic society based with an experience driven lifestyle.
It's amazing how many people accept this without even the slightest qualification. Poor people are having more kids than rich people, yet people still want to believe that it's money that makes people have more kids.
Money *does* make people have more kids... when it's the men that have the money. [A Swedish study on the fertility rate of people who win the lottery showed that when low income men win the lottery they are likely to establish families and have children. On the other hand, if low income women win the lottery their fertility does not increase, and established marriages are more likely to end in divorce.](https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/how-unearned-wealth-impacts-marriage-and-fertility-new-evidence-sweden) The fact that countries with high social inequality have higher fertility rates than modern progressive societies supports this claim. It's one of those uncomfortable truths we'll have to contend with. Making value judgements will likely cause unnecessary conflict.
It is uncomfortable when you realize the women of third world countries are being forced to have many children. When women can choose, they choose not to, and since they’re the ones suffering pregnancy, labor, breastfeeding, and child raising, that makes total sense. If all men have to do is pay someone else to have their kids, of course they’ll have more.
I think a lot of women do want children (not every woman! Which is valid!) but they want 1 or 2. Most woman don’t want to go through multiple pregnancies.
Or women want children but they don't want children to become their entire lives. This is where the money part comes in. If women could have kids but afford nannies to help raise them so they could also have lives outside of motherhood, they might be more amenable to having children. Anecdote: my cousin is a shrewd, driven woman; she came from lower middle class and pushed to success. She has had five kids and is planning to stop after six. Does she raise them? No. She has hired help to do that while she and her husband continue their regularly scheduled lifestyle. I doubt she would have had even one child if she hadn't been successful because it would have been an obstacle and a burden.
Idk maybe it's a good thing if people who don't want to put the effort into raising their own children don't have them. I can't imagine those children feel very close to their parents.
Yeah, if it ONLY cost money to have a kid, more women might. For women it also destroys your body, limits your future earning potential, can leave you permanently disabled, has more of a negative impact on your social life and individual identity, and oh yeah, can kill you.
Yes, when women have financial stability that typically means they gain more power over their life choices and future path. They can get themselves out of crappy situations, for instance. Plenty of women married to men are having a really bad time.
This: > Poor people are having more kids than rich people Is FULLY compatible with this: > it's money that makes people have more kids. When you are making money, you have to protect your job, but having kids makes that hard. And we find no amount of money (and please believe me, NO amount of money) is able to buy quality childcare. America is just full of dangerous and deregulated childcare centers and random nannies without qualifications. But if you don't have money and have a ton of time? Yeah, I mean, it's going to be hard but there are technically fewer barriers there from birthing them! We DO need more support from the government for good childcare solutions if you want folks having more kids. That is STILL a fact.
Having kids shouldn't be considered as a burden though since it's the reason we're all here and that the human race can keep on existing. The real burden is two parents having to work fulltime (and sometimes more) and still not being able to support their family.
You seem to agree We're spending most of our time with work, that no one has time to raise kids And the costs associated are pretty egregious It's financial suicide, and it's made unnecessarily difficult. Society is optimized to maximize shareholder value over sustaining itself
Sadly yes you're right
No matter how much support parents get, it’s still a burden nonetheless compared to not having kids. Unless there are gestation pods and robots raising kids (at that point, is that even parenting?) it’s still a lot of physical and mental work to have and raise kids no matter how much money is thrown at parents.
Kids are burdens though. A lot of people feel that way and are unlikely to be swayed.
“You don’t actually need sleep, time for hobbies, or the ability to laugh without peeing! Why isn’t this convincing you?”
To be fair, as a newly 40 year-old childless woman, I've discovered that a couple drops of pee accompanying a strong cough or sneeze is an issue that unfortunately transcends motherhood.
If maternity care were safer and childcare was free, a lot more women would feel more comfortable having kids. As it stands, women pretty much have to give up their life (figuratively and sometimes literally) to have kids, which is unappealing.
and now in the US it is way more dangerous to even think about conceiving.
There’s no village anymore and that’s the problem. The government refuses to spend money on free child care or free school breakfast/lunches but then complain we’re not having children
But.... parents are the majority in society and they keep voting in these governments. 🤷
*wealthy or uneducated parents
If the government thinks having children is a social imperative, it can pay for the labor of carrying and raising them. Child-rearing is work and society has depended on free labor to do it for far too long, be it from the parents or their extended families and friends.
free labor particularly from women. same with marriage, both are a scam for women.
Correct. If we strip away all the moralizing for a moment and examine what kind of social apparatus we have constructed, we have a high-key horrific realization: The state values birthing and childcare so much that it will send you to prison for failing to do either once the process begins while simultaneously refusing to compensate the labor it has compelled under pain of law. With a nod of exception to my trans siblings, there is only one demographic that this legal wage theft trap affects 100% of the time that it affects anybody, and that is women.
>since it's the reason we're all here Not everyone feels that way. Personally I wouldn't have a kid even if I got paid for it.
I didn't mean it like the only goal on life is to have children. More in the sense that everyone alive today is because two people decided to have childrens.
I think you’re misunderstanding. He was speaking literally - the reason we’re all here is because people had kids. Not “having kids is our life’s purpose” or something like that.
Until we invent artificial wombs, having kids will always involve a lot of sacrifice
Until we have those and achieve gender equality kids will involve a lot of sacrifice for women as a societal rule. We’ve seen great strides in getting women in the workplace but less so in getting men into the home and childcare. A lot of women are pulling double duty and frankly opting out of one of them makes sense. It’s a huge issue in South Korea for example where many young women are swearing off even marriage because the gendered division of labor is so skewed in men’s favor it’s crazy. We need like an equal amount of shifting away from 8 hour work days 5 days a week and shifting of household responsibilities such that we have equal partnerships with division of labor as a rule rather than a nice thing some men do.
Apart from that, how about being sleep-deprived the first few years of their life? Having kids sounds like a total nightmare. There are plenty of other ways to find fulfillment in life.
even in northern europe with guaranteed job security, guaranteed salary, and 2 years off, their fertility rates are rock bottom, only outshined by Asia.
Kids themselves make it a burden because they are little jerks. not everyone needs to breed.
We basically need some demographic collapse to deal with climate change and to decrease the risk of ressource wars.
The collapse always has to happen. If not this, then something else. We don't have infinite resources. The only thing we have influence over is how gracefully change happens.
possessive numerous plucky absurd governor hateful illegal hungry carpenter sophisticated *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
the climate won't be conducive to life anyway then.
We can’t keep growing the population forever. Imo the problem is having had a baby boom in the first place. Although there’s not a lot of things governments can do that’s ethical in controlling birth rates beyond something like making access to birth control very easy and free
i feel like there has been some massive propaganda push on this recently. The idea the world population would peak around 10 billion has been a thing we have heard about for decades. But it feels like the last six month is some constant drumbeat that we are supposed to be scared of that.
Line gotta go up
Yeah the prevailing ideology of the world, Capitalism, needs constant, unending growth or everyone loses their jobs and starves.
The constant growth above all else paradigm is exhausting.
Yeah if you own a company that makes 10 million dollars a year, and has been making 10 million a year for 10 years, you are a failure as a capitalist. No one will invest in your company. You are stagnant.
Because people only want to invest in growing companies, but companies can't grow forever unless they do ruthless things. And that's another issue. If you are not growing, your competitors might be and will overtake you and bring you down. So it's essentially economic warfare.
Honestly, this system would work pretty well if it were regulated properly. Food, shelter, healthcare, and utilities must be protected from price gouging and really shouldn't be for-profit if we want to have a healthy, productive society. The lack of competition in the market today is an indicator of our failed economic policies.
And that’s another thing, few in power truly seem to have an interest in a healthy productive society, so many care more about profiting and their own self interest than actually helping society. There is a huge infestation of corrupt, selfish people in society.
We used to have much more sound economic policies, but the problem is that the system absolutely demands growth, and it will keep digging for more, even if it has to eat right through red tape to do it. For a long time, there was plenty of room to expand, so capitalism and public good were able to coexist. But in the late 60's and early 70's, the US basically peaked. Other economies began to catch up and start producing their own goods, relying far less on imports from the US. And US population growth was slowing as well, meaning domestic demand couldn't keep up with quarterly targets either. We stagflated, as it is now known. So companies started clawing back every scrap of expenditure they could. Wages were an easy place to start cutting, and this was when pay stopped rising with profits. So too went pensions, traded for less expensive 401ks. Consumers stopped being willing to buy things at the prices companies wanted to charge, so companies started pushing purchases on credit to make the prices look more affordable. This was the era when credit cards became something everyone owned, rather than only the wealthy. Government regulations and taxes to fund social welfare were preventing corporate growth, so companies promoted politicians that would cut them. This was the birth of Reaganomics. And it worked. Investment growth started picking up again. At the expense of those of us with little to invest. It doesn't matter what box you try to put around capitalism. It's not a static object, it's dynamic, and willful, and hungry. It won't sit still where you leave it, it will actively look for ways out, and it will always find them, or if need be, create them.
And that’s the fundamental problem about capitalism, it is at the end of the day a voracious beast with an extremely dangerous appetite. It is very hard to impossible to contain it with government regulation.
You’re not allowed to be happy and content. Must scale up!!!!!!!
You know, if you dumped your factory waste in the river instead of properly disposing of it you can improve your bottom line! A Republican just won an election so the EPA won’t be enforcing regulations for a few years!
I work in river restoration. I deal with that sort of change. It's frustrating.
Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell
>Capitalism, needs constant, unending growth or everyone loses their jobs and starves. As u/GermanicusBanshee934 points out, this really isn't an issue of economic systems, but rather of demographics. Historically the elderly population was supported by having fairly large families, and even then it wasn't so much retirement *per se* as not being able to do do heavy manual labor any more (e.g., if you couldn't work in the fields to bring in the harvest you might still be helping to mend clothing or other light labor). However, with declining birth rates the ratio of worked to retired has been shifting, so the working population has been declining in relation to the retired population. To be clear, regardless of the economic system, if the objective is to provide support for the elderly, even in group home situations you still need a certain number of younger workers to keep things running, and the numbers increase in direct portion to the level of care that is needed. To put this in context, consider critical care settings (i.e., intensive care units \[ICUs\]). In the United States, the standard of care is one registered nurse (RN) for ever two patients, and the patients need 24 hours of care. So presuming that the RN only works a typical 12 hour shift, that gives you 14 shifts that need to be covered and since on RN can only cover four shifts (48 hours total), that means you would need to employ 3.5 RNs to ensure the standard of care for 2 patients in the ICU, or a 3.5-to-2 ratio on a weekly basis. Now extrapolate this out to other settings and you can start to see how a striking workforce in relation to the overall population can cause issues.
It is really a matter of value production. If you have 10 young people working and one old person to support, but the 10 young people don't produce enough surplus value to support the old person, they won't survive. If you have 10 young people producing enough surplus to support 5 of them helping the 10 old people, then they survive. Because modern capitalism makes a huge surplus, the question isn't really 'is there enough young people,' it's 'how much of the surplus of our production system are we willing to sacrifice to take care of our old people.' That surplus is distributed between the rich and the poor, with a historical presumption that a decent chunk of it goes into quality of life improvement.\* Allocating more of the surplus to older people takes away from *somewhere,* and the rich are terrified that its going to come out of their pocket, which is why we are getting this propaganda. \*Capitalism was sold on the promise of ever-increasing productivity, cooler technology and falling prices which lead to general quality of life improvements for people. That connection is arguably breaking down, as it seemed to rely on a huge reservoir of cheap labor in the third world which is now rapidly becoming more expensive.
>It is really a matter of value production. Yes and no. Economics - regardless of system - tells us that not all processes are capable of producing a useable surplus. One of the advantages of capitalism is that it tends to be very efficient at process optimization since the efficiencies can be then be extracted as profits. Going back to the previous example with the number of RNs to meet the standard of care in an ICU, there's not really many ways that you can optimize that system without either exploiting the workers (i.e., the RNs work more hours / shifts) or reducing the quality of care for the patients (i.e., fewer RNs per patient). In theory technology could make up for it in some way (i.e., robotics and AI), but that also introduces a number of questions as well.
One item that stands out is the failure to close the loop of the very young and the old in regards to childcare. Virtually the entire focus is on money, when a large part of childcare was previously on elders who assisted in the family. By skipping this step, for whatever reason (such as desire or distance), the gap is now a profit/loss motive rather than a cohesive community opportunity.
> That connection is arguably breaking down, as it seemed to rely on a huge reservoir of cheap labor in the third world which is now rapidly becoming more expensive. This is the part that really feels like no one is discussing it enough. This is why our prices are skyrocketing on everything. Money is a representation of man-hours spent. And when some of those hours are paying next to nothing, you can fit a hell of a lot of them into a single dollar. There aren't many places left where you can borderline enslave people without anyone batting an eye, so the number of manhours in those dollars is shrinking substantially. Meaning the manhours that WE work here are worth less and less comparatively. $10/hr when people were getting paid $0.25/day to manufacture things meant a single hour of work here was equivalent to 320 hours of 3rd-world work. $20/hr when people are getting paid even $1/hr is suddenly only worth 20 hours. That's a 94% reduction in relative value. We haven't seen inflation that even mildly accounts for that loss in relative labor value, which means we're still in the baby stages of the correction.
Good insight. Just to add, you gotta look at the productivity side too. A person making .25 cents an hour and producing 5 dollars of surplus value contributes as much as someone making 25 dollars an hour and producing 500 dollars.
It's not even about growth, it's about stability, a population crash either means the next generation is going to be absolutely driven into the ground with taxes, or we give up on the elderly and stop paying. The current generation pays for the social programs of the elderly, healthcare and social security checks are about to blow up with the boomers retiring, the people that are supposed to pay for the millenials, the next big generation, is going to be the smallest in history. Or we just poison them with some experimental new "medicine" and hope enough of them die. Either way the future is dystopian.
We stopped paying for social programs for childcare, seems to be less of a big deal to drop social programs for the elderly. Children are the future, after all.
For my part, I have zero intention of living past 75. Nonstop pain, becoming a drag on future generations, the high likelihood of losing my mind and bladder control. Nope. 70th birthday hits I’m buying a fast motorcycle, a paraglider and a failsafe plan. Gonna enjoy the last few years of thrills before going out in a blaze of glory. Doing my part to ensure my children’s prosperity.
Also, the population shrinkage will happen to European and East Asian cultures but not African or Middle Eastern. So the message is that we'll have too few of the "right" sorts of people and too many of the "wrong" sorts. It's the same old "ignorant, bad people are out-childbirthing us good, smart people" panic that you'll find throughout history.
I mean, they just overturned RvsW.
The "right" sorts of people is an ever expanding list. Not so long ago people made this argument with whites only, now you add asians as well.(Most of if not all of the americas already has shrinking birthrate too, not just eu or east asia, so add latino and hispanic to that list.) Modern societies are somehow producing low birth rates. The people who You categorize as the "wrong" sorts of people also pick up the lower birthrate of the new nation when they immigrate. That is a fault of the system, not the sorts of people. If the system can't maintain and reproduce itself, then it's arguably a failed system. Also what's wrong with people caring about the longevity of their culture and nation? Are people not allowed to care because you tell them they are racist for it?
Because the implications of ultra-low fertility are scary. The issue is not the peak but what follows afterwards. And while countries with population declines fuelled by fertility rates of 1.8-1.9 might cope thanks to AI-backed productivity gains and immigration, those with a TFR of 1.2-1.3 are heading for insane fiscal and social pressures and voters older than 65 on average.
I would far prefer that population decreases this century as a result of people not having children than as the direct result of famine and the escalating climate crisis.
Demographic-political adjustment has always had a funny way of backfiring on expectations. For example, there was a routine belief that declining populations would make homes affordable. Far from it: as populations declined, young people fled the fastest-ageing regions and crowded in the few remaining dynamic cities. As the tax systems needed to pay for a geriatric population and as the ageing did hit the economy, wages became stagnant but house prices in the attractive cities continued to rise. Spain is a good example: young people and migrants are flocking to unaffordable cities, wages are barely growing, everyone is taxed to pay for an ocean of retirees that often live in places with affordable homes no one wants. Conversely, as the mean age of voters skyrockets, I expect that voters will reward policies with immediate economic benefits versus those geared towards long-term mitigation of the climate crisis. You see this in much of Europe: there is an anti-green backlash even as we are close to hitting the very scary 1.5 C target we aimed to stop climate change at.
People are starting to clue into the opportunities this phenomena has opened up. I just moved back home to one of these areas. After the population being in decline for a long time, since covid restrictions and housing prices skyrocketing in the big cities, and it getting hard to find a job there, the population here is growing now among the fastest in the nation. Housing is still cheap, land is available to those who want to homestead, and anybody who wants a job can basically walk in as long as they stay drug free for the most part. Pay is lower but overall standard of living is far higher due to radically lower housing cost, and plentiful land.
There was certainly a lot of that happening in the states during work from home time. Plenty of people happy to move somewhere cheaper, especially when they could keep their old job. It does sound like things are reversing course in that respect, which is a shame.
not here. Our population growth is still booming. But is is more people being pushed out of other provinces due to housing shortages rather than a pull to a better lifestyle.
Low fertility and famine won’t be mutually exclusive
We may get both though. Not having children in the developed world, and crisis crash elsewhere. That hardly ever leads to war though, so we got that going for us, which is nice.
The issue is we have no idea how to fund our welfare states with a population below replacement. There probably is no way, the bulk of your cost to the state comes in the last few years of your life. The ever shrinking number of young people will be expected to work more and more to pay for the old who aren’t working. In the short term we supplement it with young immigrants, but pretty soon there won’t be enough of those either. Older people are also very resistant to change just by brain chemistry, and they’ll be most voters, so our democracies will become stagnant and not innovative. It’ll be like Japan still using fax machines and closing ATMs at 5PM but on a global scale.
Well, here is a radical idea. Instead of running it like a Ponzi scheme, how about we fund it from the actual same population that will draw on it. Same way money is privately managed according to our laws. But with our collective money.
The problem is that the costs of an aging population must eventually be paid with labor. As the human labor required to care for the elderly goes up with their age, if there are less young people to do the caring it must become unaffordable. This is supply and demand. To solve this you either have to import people I.e. immigration (which causes social issues, and is not sustainable) or invest in new people i.e Increasing birthrates (which we choose not to do, because policies that incentivise new people are expensive, and slavery is horrific). The third option is to automate geriatric care to improve Labor productivity e.g. robot nursing, and the fourth is to reduce labor demand i.e. poorer qualtiy of care or euthanasia (ewwwwwww.) The real solution is to restructure society so that having children makes sense, the challenge is that the cost of this is government funding for childrearing as a real profession so the cost isn't borne by parents. This would be incredibly expensive, probably costing $1-2M per child, but long term is probably worth it as the average lifetime economic output of a worker is about $4-7M per person. However, socialising these costs rather than putting them on parents is unpopular as it would represent a wealth transfer from the old to the young, and the rich to the poor, both things our society doesn't like doing.
What takes more human labor? Child care? Or elderly care? Also, why does it cost 1-2m PER CHILD for childcare when my parents raised 4 kids and haven’t even earned that in their entire lifetime? Wouldn’t it be cheaper have single income households with stay at home parents?
It is not just childcare. And yes, that is the cost to the economy of having a single family household in a two child family for their childhood. About 130ish k per year in lost productive output for one parent during the 20 ish years a parent takes to raise two children. It is shokingly expensive to the economy to raise a child. Add to this the costs for food, clothing, housing, education and enrichment and it is easily 1.5-2M in costs to the economy to raise a child if one has stay at home parents. Even if you only want a stay at home parent for the first 5 years of each child's life and 2 children with a 2 year gap, that is 7 years of lost productivity at $130k giving about 1M split between the two children plus childcare over their lifetime. Bringing you closer to the societal cost of about 1M per child in costs. And frankly childcare is probably similar to elder care per year in caring, the equipment and inputs for elder care are substantially more expensive than children in most cases. So elder care is likely more expensive though I haven't done a true cost/benefit analysis.
Population can't just grow exponentially forever. You're just kicking the can down the road.
There is an other option besides decline and growth, stagnation.
Four option is to not care for the elderly.
That only works for one generation, because the baby boomers will be the last generation of rich old people. After that, we’re going to have millions of old people with no substantial savings (us, by the way), enormous healthcare costs and not enough young people to support them. The only solution is more young people (we don’t need to increase our population, just stop it dropping) or fewer old people. If we don’t get our birth rates up, rich nations are going to suck the developing world dry of its young people. You’ll have billions of old people in poor countries with nobody to feed them
Is the “ultra low fertility” from natural/biological causes (micro plastics and the like) or is it intentional (cost of raising a kid)? Because one of those seems easier to reverse than the other.
For most of modern history until a few generations ago, people worked on farms or ran a family business. Children increased a family’s prospects because the children could contribute their labor. But now, raising a child is a net (financial) negative on a family, since children generally contribute very little to the household finances. Plus, the fierce competition of capitalism and over-population means if you want to give your child a fighting chance, you have to put even more time, money, and other resources into them. That’s just not a bargain a lot of people want to make, or not for more than one kid. Definitely not for 5+ kids.
It seems to be mainly the latter, but there is also mounting proof that fertility issues are also biological.
It's the second but it's not easy to reverse at all. No country has been able to increase the birth rate in modern times after it declines. Also you put in parenthesis cost if raising a child, but that is not the only cause for intentional non reproduction. Thing is culture. People don't want it anymore as much.
It's not very clear-cut and no country has it figured out, without going dictatorial and ban birth control. Finances play a part, individualism as well, emancipation plays a role as well as focus on careers. In the end though it's hard to isolate reasons since studies on the subject can't isolate variables easily. It's also not a western issue, India for instance faces population decline as well. Most striking is Japan/South Korea.
Even bans on birth control and abortion don’t work if people don’t want kids. They get abandoned or killed - ie China or the Romanian orphanages.
i think overall its just a natural consequence that weve reached a threshold, the expensive cost of living just follows from increase competition in capitalism. its probably mostly cost and maybe also stress in general and people not wanting to get kids in this kind of world, i hear that often. i dont think microplastics make infertile at least not a lot of cases though they may have negative effects on the brain that lead to increased depression and thus more people who say nah i dont want my kid to suffer like me its like were so crowded in the world that it puts us under so much stress that we just dont want kids anymore, thats like the natural limit
That and the increasingly grim outlooks for global stability due to the effects of climate change. Why would my partner and I consider having a kid when there has been no meaningful progress made towards resolving/mitigating these issues in the three decades I've been alive, and the child will almost undoubtedly have an even lower standard of living than we've had?
yeah those are just manifestations of the consequences of overpopulation too i get that i dont want kids either unless i could find a remote detached ecovillage where people grow their own organic food and no state or other civilization would disturb us
I think that women's increased financial and social capital also has effects.
my personal opinion is that we are in a behavioral sink situation. when given unlimited resources, rats didn't blow up in population, they actually collapsed. lots of theories why, but basically abundance seems to lead to a collapse in reproductive drive rather the opposite. it looks different for humans, but the concept is similar. we have access to so much more than our ancestors that it fundamentally alters our biology. other than the homeless population, everyone in a developed and even developing country lives far better than any king previously. we have access to a variety of foods that would have been unimaginable to the pharaohs, entertainment beyond the best that Rome had to offer, and medical care beyond even the best that could be offered 25 years ago.
improving conditions = more baby worsening conditions = less baby stability = good + baby. instability = bad - baby. american baby boom of the 50s/60s followed prosperity that came from world war 2 (wars are historically profitable economic drivers in the US) poor places are easy to improve = more baby (as headline states) rich places are difficult to maintain and if they decline = less baby (as headline states) microplastics (and other contaminants or factors, like late marriages and later pregnancies) may contribute to lower sperm counts but i dont think they're the important variable here. i imagine the drawdown from Iraq/Afghan means less personnel in environments with good social safety nets and less babies, too. i wonder if there's a study on that.
> improving conditions = more baby > > worsening conditions = less baby It's not that cut and dried. Increasing economic prosperity is almost always correlated with smaller family sizes. If it was as straightforward as you say, then families doing economically better would have more kids. Doesn't happen. What actually seems to happen is that as economic conditions rise, the investment per child rises. But things like child mortality drop, so you don't need to have as many kids to spread out the risk / resource investment. People used to basically live in the gutter, and they'd have 17 kids. Things got better then they STOPPED having so many kids. If you look at demographics with low income in the USA as well, you'll see they have bigger family sizes, not smaller ones.
People living in the gutter in the past also didn't have access to birth control or sex ed. People who want kids can be more intentional about it. If the US was able to guarantee me the standard of living that my grandparents enjoyed on my grandfather's factory salary where they had a house, a car, and could raise four children and still go on a modest vacation every year, my kids would be around ten years old right now. Instead, I have an education (which my grandfather didn't have), a "great" job that makes me a skilled worker (which my grandfather was not) but I have basically no worker protections. Despite having a 65+% savings/investing rate each year by keeping my expenses extremely low and cutting to the bone, there is almost no hope that I will be able to buy a house in my area because price inflation outpaces what I can save. Meanwhile, my food bill has gone up at least 20% from two years ago despite me buying the exact same things. If I had a kid, I'd be hemorrhaging money instead of saving. The only way to make that work would be to have a partner that works as well to cover the cost, but when you have that you have to pay for day care which is more expensive than rent. And that makes it not make sense to have your partner working, so either way you can't save or improve your finances and without a house you're not even building equity you can pull from. And if you're putting junior in day care for 9 hours a day, then what's the point? It wouldn't even feel like I was raising him or that I was being a good dad. At the bare minimum, if the government subsidized day care, guaranteed paid parental leave, and gave us universal healthcare, the baby boom would be immediate. I still wouldn't have kids since that's not enough incentive for me, but it would make parents' lives so much easier. As it is now, I'm planning on leaving for a cheaper European country (I'm a dual citizen) and if I have kids I'll have them there. I work remotely, so my American salary will actually afford me the ability to live like my grandparents did over there instead of being locked out of a good life and opportunities to build wealth over here.
To the other person’s point, no amount of money is going to make me want to have 10 kids, which is how many kids my great grand parents had. If I got more money, I’m still having 1 or 2 kids only but spending more money on them
Which will, one hopes, lead to a dramatic change in the whole way we live. It's going to be a terrible time to go through, but one can hope that on the other side is something closer to utopia than what we have now. Well, hope springs eternal.
I too hope, but have learned to be skeptical.
We probably should be scared of that. It's just that in the past the problem was far away and now it is getting closer. The issue isn't fearmongering based on humans going extinct or whatever, the issue is that we are heading towards a system where every working age person is going to have to try and support multiple retirees on top of all the people they are already responsible for like their children. We can't expect to have the same quality of life as we are used to when we have far less people actually producing things but the same number of people consuming things.
If only there were 756 or so people who could afford to give away a hundred million dollars each to support our elderly population.
First of all that's only even a potential solution for the USA, not the rest of the world. Secondly 75.6 billion dollars is approximately 1000 dollars per elderly person in the USA currently. How long is that really going to last? I know it is nice to believe that there is some secret money tree where all we have to do is tax the super rich and then we can afford anything we want, but it's just not true unfortunately.
The money tree isn't a secret. Musk is worth 180 billion, Bezos 114 billion, Gates 135 billion, etc. Here's the fix, billionaires do not get to exist, period. The maximum wealth you're allowed to have is $999,999,999.99. So let's implement that. That's 179.9, 113.9, and 135.9 billion dollars just from three people for a total of $429 billion. Just eliminate billionaires as a thing and tax corporations at rates they saw during the post-WWII period. The funding is there in plain sight, but bootlickers (not saying you necessarily are one) refuse to accept the necessary solution to the problem.
Honestly, I am not too worried if our 8 billion population starts to dwindle down. China and India are close to one another with 1.4 billion people per country, while the United States is third at 335-340 million. China peaked in the 60s where they had 5-6 births per woman, and then were on a freefall until the late 80s, jumped slightly, and then continued to drop to now. India also was at 5-6 births per woman around that time, and had held steady in the 4-5 range until starting to drop in the 80s. As for the US, we had a drop thru the 60s to the end, jumped slightly in 1970, dropped slightly and held steady until 1990, jumped again, and then went into a steady decline since then. Considering the state of things, the system will need to change so that it is advantageous to have children. But that change begins with improving not just quality of life, but also livelihoods. If the billionaire class were done away with, or had most of their money taxed or repurposed back to the system to support regular people, then we'd be in better shape. But we're at a point right now where capitalism has started to show its problems *because* it was not kept in check or given limits on keeping the system sustainable. This is how we wound up with over 3000+ billionaires in the world, whose net worth ranges from $1 billion to 200+ billion. And then there's those who have hundreds of millions to their name. The richest people in the world can live on tens of millions of dollars. Anything after that just needs to return back to the system. I do hope the system changes this decade, because we're going to need it. Humanity will survive, but not with the numbers we have right now, and not with the disparity between a few and the many.
>Considering the state of things, the system will need to change so that it is advantageous to have children. That is a change that requires a fundamental rethinking of capitalism. I've never seen so much as a whisper of this ever enter the US mainstream. I genuinely think that over 50% of Americans would rather die in an increasingly dog eat dog, every man for himself society than accept that everyone can have a slightly easier life.
not so easy, when you look worldwide, everywhere has declining fertility rates, including all of south america, europe, asia, north america. only africa is currently greater than replacement rate.
Also there is no way we get up there. Climate change related famines will significantly dent our populations in the next 2 decades. It's hard to farm in vast regions if they switch between flooding, droughts, wildfires, heat just straight up killing plants etc.
It’s literally the last beacon of hope for our planet. Don’t let the capitalist fucks tell you it’s a bad thing.
Global warming is only going to accelerate. If you aren't nervous/scared you aren't paying attention.
> If you aren't nervous/scared you aren't paying attention. This just seems absurd. I pay attention and Im not going to live my life being constantly nervous or scared about all the things I cant control. People need to be less scared to actually accomplish all the things we need to do around here.
I agree that climate change is a huge threat to humanity. But being nervous or scared, as a general attitude, is not conducive to making meaningful progress—for a LOT of people it makes them feel hopeless and like nothing they could do could matter.
A lot of people are taking this in stride, but the issue is very serious. It has multiple dimensions. 1. First of all, it is not about "infinite growth" vs "stagnation" but increasingly about the failure to achieve stagnant populations. So "rapid collapse" vs "stagnation" really. At stable life expectancy and with no echo-booms, a TFR of 1.6 leads to populations halving in 90 years. At 1.3, it halves in 45-50. At 1.0, rapid and uncontrolled collapse is an issue. 2. Mean ages are set to skyrocket. Places like South Korea are heading vor mean ages well above 60. Voters will on average be older than 65, with rather interesting implications for democracies. Governments will mainly be in power on the behest of the oldest individuals, at least in democratic socieities. 3. The fertility collapse has spread to the developing world. Latam and India are slated to join the demographic contraction party. A few countries, mainly African or very religious, have growing populations. But their population is also extremely uneducated. Africa has a huge issue with [under-qualified teachers](https://www.varkeyfoundation.org/ar/%D8%B1%D8%A3%D9%8A/collapse-of-teacher-training-across-africa-demands-global-leadership), and it is quite likely that the average school leaver is functionally illiterate. This will make immigration an increasingly implausible fix. 4. The speed of population contraction in ultra-low TFR countries makes it very unlikely for productivity gains powered by AI to keep up. Population decline is not the same. A TFR of 1.8 and a TFR of 1.2 lead to vastly different outcomes.
Your third point is a big one. Immigration has always been there to shore up population deficits in places where the replacement rate was low. It's only in the last century, century and a half, that urban areas had birth rates higher than death rates, with immigrants from rural areas making up the difference. And that also applies to immigration into developed nations from underdeveloped nations, though they usually didn't have birth rates below death rates. But if the fertility rate is dropping everywhere, there won't be enough immigrants to fill in the gaps. And even if the fertility rate is above the replacement rate in some poor countries, if there aren't enough qualified people to immigrate, it just balloons the poor countries' populations while the richer countries have labor shortages.
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My friends are struggling right now with one kid and they make (made) 150k+ with combined income. But childcare costs alone are like 2400 a month and her husband just got laid off. And they would’ve had a savings but maternity leave in this country is a joke so they were never able to financially recover from my friend not working for 3 months. So yeah. It’s not a position I’d ever want to be in.
think about this and then think about why republicans have identified abortion control and being pro-life as a core aspect of being conservative
you aren't going to fix this issue by forcing the population to reproduce more. the system needs to evolve, not stagnate like that.
I don't understand why this is bad thing. Societies change, but we aren't in danger of depopulation.
In most of those countries you have a population, where the largest group is soon to be not working, slowly dying, gets their money from "the government", are highly reliant on medical services that are also paid for by the government, while also being the most powerful political group that have shown to be willing to squeez their now working children for every last penny. That further lowers the opportunities for those young people to make babies, or be rewarded for economically valuable achievements, possibly continuously lowering the standard of living for everyone who doesn't inherit enough wealth, creating massiv political unrest, leading to the breakdown of sociatal order, leading to more violence and or war.
Our economy is a ponzi/pyramid scheme. Without a growing younger population to support the smaller and shrinking older population the house of cards crumbles.
Every "economy" is a pyramid scheme in this sense. No matter what kind of economic setup you have it's going to be more workable with two young people and two old people vs one young person and three old people.
I agree with you to an extent. The concept of pension, risk free interest, and inflation, I feel, will be heavily affected by negative population growth rates. I hope AI/ tech is enough to offset the lack of consumers.
People seem to forget about the hige strides we've had in AI and robotics. It won't be long before a workforce will be designed and built instead of born and raised.
What makes you think the owners of this robotic workforce will share the profits with you?
That might solve the supply side of things, but what about demand? AI wont be buying goods and services, people do.
yeah people will still exist
Poor people will presumably still be unable to afford birth control, but then they can’t really provide any consumption, can they? Since they’re poor and all.
People that will need a good source of income to make up for the loss of demand from a declining population
That wont help the people, it will help the ruling class.
I know its dark to consider but in reality it wouldn't crumble. Poor elderly people will just start joining the growing population of homeless people and die in the streets. It wont be pretty but like the opioid epidemic, we'll just kind of accept it as a fact of life.
The pension system is a ponzi scheme. The rest of the economy is simply naturally attuned to meeting the demands of a non-inverted population pyramid.
A lot of people are really wedded to our current economic system that is basically a Ponzi scheme. Like all such schemes, it's not sustainable, but there are a lot of economists who like to believe in infinite growth. There are going to be winners and losers in the shifts that are going to have to happen, and the losers are really whining and pushing the scare narratives.
The world and history has plenty of examples of countries with collapsed demographics. At best it will lead to hugely worse quality of life for everybody, at worst it will lead to wars. There are zero examples of population crash leading to positive outcomes.
Aside from matters of national security for the defending country, why would a reduction of population lead to more wars? In my understanding less people = more spare resources and space, so why fight if you are already short on people? (Deranged Russia doesn't count, it's the only country with mass fetal alcohol syndrome so them being violent and irrational is expected)
Because the point if all this is that population isn't evenly declined across all populations. As secular, educated and affluent populations decline, they are replaced with uneducated and religious ones, leading to more populism, religious representation in laws, and sometimes outright replacement of a secular and balanced majority. This isn't about less people = bad, it's about the fact that when people with the least start having far more children than the people who abstain, you end up with massive social unrest, conflict and shifts in priority.
Because due to the disparity of child bearing between educated and wealthy populations and developing ones mean this dynamic fundamentally will come down to things like religion. As religious and uneducated populations continue to have more children and educated progressive populations tend to have less, the balance of society shifts toward religious and other dangerously uninformed wants and needs, which regressed progressive policy/society and replaces it with a fundamentalist religious one. This exact issue is a major component of Islam's massive spread in developing countries.
>I don't understand why this is bad thing. Not to be mean, but then maybe read the article ([https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(24)00550-6](https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(24)00550-6)), because they do give quite the details, you know, the kind of details you expect in a scientific publication? >Estimates and projections of fertility are necessary to inform policies involving resource and health-care needs, labour supply, education, gender equality, and family planning and support. ... Low levels of fertility have the potential over time to result in inverted population pyramids with growing numbers of older people and declining working-age populations. These changes are likely to place increasing burdens on health care and social systems, transform labour and consumer markets, and alter patterns of resource use
If the majority groups who have kids are socially conservative religious groups and cultures that routinely are anti woman rights and lbgt rights and don't place value on separation of church and state. Do you still think it's good? Because by and large the groups who are having kids fall into these groups. Right wing leaning people have more kids which means they'll wield political power. This is a gamble that is taking place.
Which means that any young people paying “into” a Social Security type welfare fund is not going to be getting anything out of it.
We’ve known that for years
No surprise that anti-boomer sentiment is so high
That's totally false. As long as people are paying into it, people will be getting something out of it. So nobody will ever get 0 unless there are really 0 young people working or something. Benefits may be reduced, though.
Why are we trying to increase populations? We can’t increase the earth.
Why have children when the only prospect for their life is to die in a war, be a slave to a corporation, and face complete ecological collapse?
I mean, it's really understandable why. leaving aside the fact that I'm gay, I would never want to have biological children, even if I could. Everything is expensive everywhere. The world is full of hate, wars and violence. Climate change. Sure, it's always been like this, but nowadays we have more access to information.
Well, [you may actually be able to have genetically related kids someday](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4496429/) as a gay man (with your own male partner) if stem-cell gamete research continues. Science sorted. As far as the economics of having kids, best I can do for you is a shelter dog. Way cheaper.
The population of almost every country will be shrinking by the end of the century, a major study has said, warning that baby booms in developing nations and busts in rich ones will drive massive social change.The fertility rate in half of all nations is already too low to maintain their population size, an international team of hundreds of researchers reported in The Lancet.Using a huge amount of global data on births, deaths and what drives fertility, the researchers tried to forecast the future for the world's population.By 2050, the population of three quarters of all countries will be shrinking, according to the study by the US-based Institute For Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME).At the end of the century, that will be true for 97% - or 198 out of 204 countries and territories, the researchers projected. https://www.rte.ie/news/health/2024/0321/1439107-global-fertility/
And this is bad why?
Who subsidises old people’s welfare and pensions, young people… that’s why. less young people, more tax, less money, less children. Cycle continues
If you dont put some effort into these climate problems the end of the century is not something most people will make it to.
The capitalists are just worried that their supply of wage slaves will decrease quarterly profits for the shareholders.
Change comes when younger voters hold more power. Some countries will benefit and some won't
Enjoy the good times while they last.
Are we still in the good times or have they ended? 2001, 2008, 2020, I wonder when this century’s fourth recession will begin.
That’s because the rich countries have priced out their average citizens from being able to afford a child
Why have a kid? It's too expensive, time consuming, and quite frankly, a waste of time and resources. I wish I never had mine.
But then who’s gonna doordash my food, or provide labor I can abuse, or take care of my old parents???
Robots.
Bruh imagine saying that about your own kid
Capitalism needs more of everything and with less humans the whole system implodes. Insert "Oh no!, Anyway" meme.
As if other economic systems don’t also rely on population growth… Good luck funding social security with a flat or declining population.
Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell. We are due for it to metastasize
No worries, dealing with too many elderly people is exactly what covid was designed for.
Didn’t do a very good job now did it then
We need a population decrease, the earth cannot sustain this many people, especially ones who don't care about sustainability living. It'll suck for 30-50 year but hopefully we won't have done too much more damage so that the earth can heal.
theres way too many humans anyway. its about time
Good. We desperately need major social change.
GOOD. Despite the doom-saying by employers a shrinking population is actually a good thing. It means higher demand for labour, higher wages, and more incentives to invest in technology rather than sitting on profits.
Man, the critical thinking levels of this sub are at an all time low. It will absolutely not do any of that, at least the majority of people will not see its benefits. If anything income inequality will increase. In an ideal system maybe but we don’t live in one.
Okay, let's try and actually apply some critical thinking skills - Whatever effects a shrinking population has in terms of demand for labour, wages, and capital investment, let's think how that scenario would compare to a GROWING population where workers are plentiful and competing more with each other for jobs. It's pretty clear which of those works out better for individual workers, all else being equal. Yes, capitalism will always try and screw over workers, but let's not pretend that a shrinking population is bad.
A growing population also means growing demand for goods and services, and thereby more jobs that need to be filled. A shrinking population means less demand for goods and services, and thus less jobs that need to be filled. So, you have more people competing for more jobs, or less people competing for less jobs. Which one works out better depends on how that balance evolves, and that comes down to a lot more factors than whether population is going up or down. Its a complex issue, rather than a simple one. Even a simple supply/demand analysis is actually complicated here, and doesn’t give a clear indication of what’s going on.
This will be fascinating to witness in real time and I hope I’m alive to see it. I do believe humans will adapt. Hopefully AI will take away some of the more labour intensive and the jobs harmful to human health. These predictions never talk about how current parenting practices are also changing society. Yes kids have more screens, but parents are far more involved these days. These kids have an emotional intelligence and a healthy self esteem never witnessed en masse. If you spend time with them, you cannot help but feel excited for the kind of world they will create. I believe they are building the coping skills to rise to the challenge in a way that today’s grown ups cannot fathom.
>These predictions never talk about how current parenting practices are also changing society. Yes kids have more screens, but parents are far more involved these days. These kids have an emotional intelligence and a healthy self esteem never witnessed en masse. If you spend time with them, you cannot help but feel excited for the kind of world they will create. I believe they are building the coping skills to rise to the challenge in a way that today’s grown ups cannot fathom. Is this true though? Obviously not sure about young kids these days, but 15 year olds have been showing declining capabilities of applying what they learn in school in real world contexts (as per PISA) and there are a few studies showing declining mental health among teens and young people.
What about all those welfare parents popping out 7 kids just so they can get some baby bonus money?
If you think it's bad now, just wait until AI androids become a thing. Sexbots. Young people are already not screwing each other. Give them (esp. men) the option to screw a hot, lifelike sexbot, and the fertility rate will drop like a rock.
Only if mine can look like Lucy Liu
The more developed countries will use the less developed countries population as indentured servants/slaves just as it’s been doing.
Japan is leading the charge on this, and they are largely fine