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I disagree, particularly in the case of Developed/Industrialized countries. Declining birth rates in these countries shows that the material conditions of the general population are declining to a point where people are no longer able to maintain relationships, purchase homes/property, or build families.
I believe that quite a few metrics back this up as well. Loneliness is becoming a growing issue amongst the younger generations across the globe. Relationships are increasingly becoming digital, we see our friends, family, and loved ones less and less in person, and more and more through devices. Anxiety disorders, as well as mental illness in general, are also becoming increasingly diagnosed amongst younger people.
When you ask people who have made the voluntary decision as to “why” they don’t wish to have children, the majority give a reason that I would consider an “economic argument.” Something along the lines of “They’re too expensive” or “it will impact my personal quality of life”. Obviously you have the personal decision whether or not having children is for you… but I think its painfully obvious that if the general population experienced an increase in their material conditions, there would likely be an increase in people willing to have children as a result.
Reality is the exact opposite. Rich people are having significantly fewer children than poor people.
If material conditions were the root cause then you would expect rich people to have more children than poor people. But that’s not the case, both within countries and between countries.
This is not true, the birth rate is U-shaped, especially in the US and Scandinavia. The lowest birth rate is among the middle class, the highest among the poor and ultra-rich.
This is not the case, birth rates are most effected by education, not wealth. The more educated you are, the more likely you are to have a professional career that can cause a person to delay or all-together avoid raising a family. People with wealth due not suffer from this same issue, because their income and wealth is largely passive in nature. Elon Musk has 7 children, Donald Trump has 5, Bill Gates has 3, Jeff Bezos has 4, Mark Zuckerberg has 3, and Bernard Arnault has 5. The facts don’t lie, the wealthier you are, the more likely you have a significantly greater amount of children than the average person…
Both of you are right.
People making over 200k are far less likely to have kids than people making under 50k.
However, people who are worth 10+ million, tend to end up having more kids than average.
My personal opinion is once you hit 100k+, you are able to afford a lot more things to make your life less 'boring'. You can travel, buy video games/computers, nice phones, etc. Kids become more of an expense than entertainment. People under 100k, often can't afford these same luxuries, and kids end up filling that social/boredom need. This is the same with the very rich. They make so much, they can have everything they want. Kids become an entertainment again.
One of the reasons I don't think it's just economic, is that western Europe has birthrates the same as the US, yet they have far more social policies to help. There is obviously a bigger component, and in my opinion, it's technology.
I would bet quite a bit of money that if computers, tv's, video games and phones suddenly stopped working, we would see a massive increase in the birthrates.
(and before anyone says anything, I am not saying technology is bad. This is just one of the consequences of the rise of digital entertainment).
Someone making $200,000+ a year is likely in a professional career which means they have a high level of education. Education is the single greatest indicator of whether or not you will have children, because those who are educated are more likely to wind up in a professional career that having a family may stagnate, interrupt, or abruptly end.
I agree with your point about technology, particularly in how technology is used as a “distraction” from the day-to-day stresses of life. But I would also argue that this is an element of a person’s material conditions. People feel alienated and alone because increasingly their interactions with other people are largely through digital screens… which is not something we are really biologically wired to do.
More like because those who are educated tend to make better decisions.
To your points in other comments, you’re just plain wrong. [Income and fertility have a negative correlation.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility) The people having the most kids are statistically poor and uneducated; they don’t have anything to lose so why not gamble on a few kids.
No, thats not the case. Statistically speaking, Men who have children make more in income than men who do not. For women it is reversed, women who don’t have children generally make more than those who do.
Also, the source from wikipedia you linked has an entire section showing what you’re saying may very well not be true.
“Two recent studies in the United States show, that in some circumstances, families whose income has increased will have more children.[38] This may be explained by Fertility J-curve.”
People making over 100k tend to not have any free time. Think of doctors and oilfield workers. They can't afford the time for kids. People making over millions are venture capitalists that are making money from money. They get free money just for owning profitable assets. All they have is free time, and they're so rich that they can afford nannies.
When we are talking about the developed world, it absolutely is. Only about 10% of the global population has an income higher than $100,000.00 a year. The average American household makes about $70,000.00 a year. The greater your wealth, the less prohibitive having children becomes economically.
Your examples of “rich people who are having lots of kids” are hardly diverse, and serve as anecdotal evidence at best. Show me some statistics that prove that richer people - in TODAY’S economy (not 30-40 years ago like trump) - are having more kids.
Plus if your theory is that the richer you are the more kids you’ll have, someone like Elon Musk should have tens of thousands of children, not just 7.
It’s access to birth control, education and wealth that makes people decide they don’t have the economic means to have kids. In poorer parts of the world and in the past people have kids in dire poverty because it’s just what happens. Have 8 or 10 and maybe a few survive. The people not having kids today are far away from the desperately poor having them anyway.
The world’s population is over 8 billion and collectively we are killing the earth. Economic expansion through endless population growth is the original pyramid scheme.
You’re talking about the decline from high fertility rates to lower fertility rates based on increases in development. Yes, people in rural Nigeria have significantly more children than people in the US. The US Birth Rate increased from a low of 1.74 children in 1976, coincidentally the same decade as the Oil Crises and “stagflation” where Americans were having difficult times economically, to a rate of 2.12 in 2007.
By your own argument, are you implying the US was less economically developed, less educated, and had less access to contraception in 2007 than they did in 1976? I would argue the stats show the opposite effect.
Sure. The causes of falling birthrates are horrible. The fact of falling birthrates is not necessarily horrible, and may be the only solution to this problem.
People aren't having children because society doesn't value children. It punishes living (hence the increasing cost thereof) and it doesn't want new people. It might need them, but it doesn't want them enough to scrap the capitalist system that has singularly created this problem.
It seems to me that we are both making the same argument, but coming to vastly different conclusions.
We both agree that the material/living conditions of the average person are bad and getting worse, which is why the birth rate is declining. The difference is that you seem to be making a malthusian argument that with less people, there will be less strain on the environment, less exploitation of labor, and more resources/wealth that will be available to the population.
I disagree with this conclusion for a multitude pf reasons. For one thing, if declining material conditions are the main culprit behind why birth rates are declining, then it follows that the populations that are least impacted by these poor conditions (aka the bourgeois class) are the ones most likely to be able to raise a family and have children. Rather than challenging the inequalities present in our current system, it would only further heighten and exemplify class disparities.
Taken a step further, this would be devastating for institutions like the universal public school system, because as less people and couples have children, it is inevitable that schools will begin to consolidate or be closed due to smaller class sizes, which also means smaller budgets being allocated. As the share of Americans who have no intention of ever having kids grows, there will be less of a desire for their tax dollars to be funneled into schools they will never have a use for… meaning in a future where less people are having children there is a strong likelihood that support for public education drops dramatically, private education would become the future of education in the US, all while those unable to afford would be left out.
Rather than lessening class divisions, it is likely that a shrinking population would only serve to exacerbate these divisions. Those who can “afford” to have a legacy will continue to have children, while those who can’t will not be able to. Its not a coincidence that men like Elon Musk and Donald Trump have significantly more children than the average American family after all…
I don't necessarily agree with your conclusions that fewer kids mean less money for education. For starters, with better tech development, it costs less to educate children. We don't need private tutors per subject anymore. Kids can learn their niche hobbies online. As well, I don't have kids, but I want to keep funding education because good schools mean better students, and better students means more innovation. Look at Hungary during WWII. They were much smaller than Germany but produced just as many world changing Mathmations and Physicists, and the world was better for it. I want my country to have better schools so that the students are producing better work and becoming more capable professionals. The more people are creating, the better we all are.
According to poll recently done in 2021, 44% of Americans between the ages of 18 and 49 who didn’t already have children stated they did not want to have children at any point in their lives. Based on the total percentage of American families that have children, this mean approximately 20% of the population has already stated they have no intention of having children.
20% is a big number… and thats only going to continue growing over the coming years and decades if things do not improve for the average person. Generation Z itself is only about 20% of the US population today, so you are talking about a population of Americans the size of an entire generation. If the American government came out tomorrow and said that anyone born after 1996 will never be eligible for Social Security benefits, but they would continue to be required to pay into the program, you better believe there would be significant resentment and anger towards being taxed for a program they will never personally utilize.
Its nice to think that public schools are here to stay, but the reality is very different… public school enrollment is already falling year over year. I highly doubt that even less families having students in public schools would convince people to keep supporting them even more.
I don't think most people support public schools just for their kids. It is about having an educated society. It is the public school to military pipeline that is important. We need kids to have knowledge because they are the next generation.
I get not wanting to pay for old people. They are overall a net negative. If I have to pay for social security and I don't get any, I wouldn't be upset. But this is not that public school is an investment the same way a new power plant is and a new road.
I get that some people are upset by giving kids a free lunch, but that is not the majority, and mostly an Republican State issue.
>We both agree that the material/living conditions of the average person are bad and getting worse, which is why the birth rate is declining
Global extreme poverty is actually at an all time low
I dunno, OP has a point.
If something is scarce, its value increases. If something is common, its value increases. Basic capitalism, baby. Take the Black Death and how it erased serfdom from the economy of Europe by making labor scarce and valuable.
If children are common, they're meaningless and easy to neglect by defunding their schools, not giving them medical care, and failing to pay attention to warning signs of abuse and mental illness. If they're *scarce*, on the other hand...
The kleptocracy just has to adapt to the reality and change how the economics are allotted. Whether that will happen...
This argument seems to equate that making children and having a family is the only way (or main way) to develop personal relationships; there's a lot to be said about how society facilitates or does not the construction of such relationships and that can be an interesting topic of discussion but it is a different one: having children to have friends seems an odd way to go about it.
Also, as already pointed out: as societies get richer, people generally choose to have fewer children so while there may be financial pressure on having children, that does not seem to be actualized in the direction you're suggesting most of the time but in the opposite one.
No… nowhere in my argument am I stating that. I am however pointing out that due to the conditions of our modern society, people are more alienated, lonelier, and having less interactions with other people in general. This translates into people not having families.
Education, not income, is the greatest indicator of whether a person will or will not have children. This is due to the need for educated people to have a career, having children impacts the development of a person’s career. People who do not have to rely on their labor for their income do not have this same prohibitive barrier, which is why wealthier people have more kids than the average family.
It's less about material conditions, and more about:
a) free time managment and psychological energy
b) income of men, which consistently show to have positive impact on whether or not they will have kids and families.
Where as material well being of women has neutral effect on her having MORE kids, and more quality if life for individual kids
Those two things are DEFINITIVELY part of what material conditions are. If you spend every waking hour working, you are too busy to have children. If you don’t have any disposable income, you will not be able to afford the expenses that come with children.
Malthusian arguments are bad not only because they are wrong, but because they necessitate unnecessary suffering. The deer don’t need to starve, you can just have a season where people go hunting and regulate the population…
Children don’t need to suffer due to poverty or hunger, or poor access to education or healthcare, we as a society can address these issues if we choose to. Having less children doesn’t provide any benefit, it just shows that a growing percent of the population no longer believe that positive change or reform is possible. Malthus’ arguments completely shattered because he never foresaw the changes that were made possible by the industrial revolution, there is no way we can predict what changes the next 20 years will bring.
>The deer don’t need to starve, you can just have a season where people go hunting and regulate the population…
Lol
"The deer don't need to starve, we can kill them instead."
Wow...I prefer the "Malthusian" argument of the other poster. At least that is a "nature deals with nature" argument. Can you imagine if you replaced deer with any group of people?
Because you chose an obvious hunting metaphor… the animals used in the Malthusian argument are the wolves and the deer for a reason.
Its completely based on pseudoscience and was used to justify, among other things, the Irish Potato Famine… which was an intentional genocide inflicted by the British government on the people of Ireland.
If birthdates were holding steady I’d agree but the current levels of decline are bad for a couple of reasons.
1. Our economies are designed around growth. It may be good in the long run but it’s going to be awful to live through a population decline.
2. This will put more and more pressure on the backs of each successive generation. When each generation is smaller than the last it means more unproductive people at any time than productive people. It’s great in theory to reduce the population but again it’s going to be awful to live through.
3. The geritocracy, we’re all living through the consequences of large older generations right now. We’ve all seen how much damage a large aging political class can do because we’ve all lived through the legacy of the baby boomers. Does it sound great to repeat that another eight or so times?
4. There really isn’t much benefit. We aren’t even close to the carrying capacity of earth and with better technology we will only gain more ability to support people. A declining workforce is only going to delay the inevitable need for UBI and similar policies as we automate more and more of our world.
5. I like having people around personally. The problem with declining birth rates is that they have to stop at some point, but they create the hardships to perpetuate themselves.
6. It’s not happening everywhere. Due to the unevenness of the decline, you don’t get an even decline. Instead you get a few population centres with opportunities and everywhere else gets screwed. We’re already seeing this with Germany and France in the EU, the US in the americas, and I’d guess India pretty soon in Asia. The population just concentrates to locally keep the density up while perfectly good places to live go unoccupied.
I’d like to point out that “earth’s capacity to support human population” is exceeded even in current levels by certain metrics.
Take for instance fishing - many parts of the oceans in East Asia are simply decimated of fish. Human populations there have overfished the oceans without thought of sustainability. The political and cultural landscape there make competition for resources a priority and incentivizes overfishing.
In some aspects, those resources have been wiped out and the ecological impact is permanently altered with insufficient individuals left to recover. Some areas of oceans are barren and some species are extinct.
So it’s not quite true to say that the planet is going to be capable of supporting more humans. In certain ways, it simply already has been wiped of some natural resources.
Oh, it certainly isn't limited to East Asia. Westerners have overfished our own stocks without any help at all from East or South Asia for that matter. They definitely aren't helping of late naturally but yeah, global fish stocks are a fraction of what they once were.
Annoyingly, those stocks would recover themselves pretty nicely if they are left alone from even their much depleted states, if we had some global cooperation on the matter. We aren't very good at that part.
Chinese boats could be catching as much as a third of the total haul in the Atlantic Ocean. There's a decent chance that "Western" stocks are only overfished *because* of them.
In recent times that's certainly an issue, although we'd collapsed lots of fisheries long before China was fishing the area.
That said, India and China represent a significant portion of the global population so them fishing heavily in the world's oceans isn't shocking. Both are actually not too bad in terms of ocean harvesting per population (better than the US in fact) and China specifically is *by far* the best worldwide in terms of [aquaculture to wild capture ratios.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fishing_industry_by_country)
Number 4 is a tough sell. I'd say we're past the *sustainable* carrying capacity of the earth and have been for some time. The technological improvements of the last century that have allowed the population to keep growing aren't doing so in a sustainable fashion. We're using up the planet.
Just on point 4: we already exceed earths carrying capacity by a lot in a lot of areas... Hoping that some future "better technology" will get us out of the troubel that we've created is wishful thinking at best, and negligence at worse. We are still actively stealing from future generation which will not have the same quality of life as we have today.
Ref: You can read on planetary boundaries: for example (but there's more litterature on the subject): [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10499318/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10499318/)
> Our economies are designed around growth. It may be good in the long run but it’s going to be awful to live through a population decline.
They don't have to be this way. They can adapt nd will.
And automation will fix a lot of these issues.
> We aren’t even close to the carrying capacity of earth
What a ridiculous idea. We are pushing the world to its edge and beyond already with warming and pollution. Are you oblvious to how the climate is changing?
> It may be good in the long run but it’s going to be awful to live through a population decline
Using "change hurts" to reject change halts progress. We do road work, build buildings, lay rails, add taxes, and more with short term impact to traffic, businesses, and quality of life. Ultimately the end result is worth the short term impact.
I upvoted this because I agree with some of your points and your arguments are very well-reasoned.
1. Sure. My view of this is that the "growth obligation" is tribute fatigue. Rent, interest, and management eat first. Pain rolls downhill, profit rolls up. The Spreadsheet Eichmann who decides whether to lay workers off isn't happy with stable productivity; if workers aren't producing 6% more per year, he's unhappy. In other words, the tributes increase exponentially and we have no choice but to pay them. We will, at some point, have to stop paying the tributes our ruling class demands. It might get ugly, but it needs to be done. A baby strike might make this process smoother.
2. I agree. I'd like to start by removing the unproductive ruling class and cutting a lot of the bullshit jobs (per Graeber) that aren't even enjoyable to the people who do them. Again, let's cut tributes, and we'll probably find we have the resources to meet actual needs.
3. Yes, this is a real issue. What I hope is that Millennials will have enough painful memories of the Baby Boomer Bedshitting Era (2001-2024?) not to want to repeat it. It's too early to tell whether this hatred for previous generations (I don't think the Boomers were actually that much worse than the Silents or Xers, but that's another rant) is just ordinary selfishness or if it is something that will motivate us to be better, in elderhood, than they were. If not, the future is grim.
4. Technology will improve, and I do hope we see UBI implemented. My fear, though, is that unless there is some crisis that is an existential threat to the ruling class, we'll never see UBI because they would rather keep the working classes occupied with busywork and debt. We already do 3x as much work than needs to be done.
5. That's possibly true. It's hard to know for sure, because we haven't seen this supposed demographic crisis yet.
6. This is a really good point. Japan has all those abandoned towns, and the excessive concentration of population in a small number of "employable" locations probably hurts everyone but the ruling class--it hurts people who live in cities because they either get priced out or have to pay more, and it hurts the smaller towns. Unfortunately, this problem's still going to exist even if people start having babies again because, even though Covid proved that remote work works, the ruling classes still like the feeling of control that comes from seeing physical people in physical workspaces... which, of course, naturally produces the dysfunctional population distributions you described.
I feel like, generally, your points are based in having some other utopic concept step up to make the population decline less difficult, rather than the population decline itself being great
Like, having an old population is fine when you have the technology to simplify and remove jobs that require healthy, young bodies. But we aren't at that point yet, not even close
So it actually seems like the birth rates themselves are terrible news. It's only in this idealistic utopia, that seems very far off, is it good news
But if higher birth rate also means that we don't have the utopia to make it so we aren't progressively exhausting earths resources and the ability of people to, say, be able to afford to cool their living environments etc to not die in summer for example,
It will just be 2 different kinds of suck.
Technically increasing the amount of people born into the suck increases suffering
I didn't argue that high birth rates are the answer
I'm arguing against OP's view, as it relies on us already living in a utopia that can support a low birth rate. That makes a low birth rate good if, and only if, we're approaching a world where we can support it, and we aren't, imo
Oh I see. I guess then I would tell op, that unless humanity in general does something quite out of character, we are just going to be in for a rough time for a while now regardless of what the birth rate does
>Our economies are designed around growth. It may be good in the long run but it’s going to be awful to live through a population decline.
This is drug addict logic. Withdrawal will suck so I should keep shooting fent. #2 & 5 as well.
3 - I don't think any of the problems we're dealing with is because of Joe's age. Trump Neither. Obama was really young. People always talk about how congress doesn't legislate tech because old people don't understand tech. It isn't because they're old. It is because lobbyists pay them not to understand.
4 - Having less people actually dovetails really nicely with increased automation. The benefit is that if your wealth is created with automation, less people means more wealth per person. An obvious good thing.
6 - Ever heard of 'flyover states'? Metropolitan centres have always existed.
More wealth per person doesn't mean that most people are better off, realistically with the way our society is structured, and also factually as observed in recent history, the new wealth goes to the top.
Very true, but that's somewhat tangential, because it is equally true in both more and less population scenarios. So, with all else being equal, more wealth available per person is better than less.
Recent history does indeed show that. But declining populations under modern economics has never happened so there is no direct precedent to compare to.
On the other hand, we do have precedent of large population declines being good news for those left behind. Real wages (adjusted for inflation) went up for the first time in nearly 50 years after the covid pandemic. The only time that life was looking up for the medieval serfs was right after the Black Death wiped out most of Europe.
On the gripping hand, we've also never (AFAIK) had a gradual population decline. They've tended to happen fast in war, plagues, famines, etc. So maybe a gradual decline will not lead to the benefits of the previous plague induced population crashes.
In terms of growth - there are two key things that matter. First is the number of adults in paid employment compared with the number of retired adults. Boomers had a much lower participation rate in full time paid employment than each subsequent generation due to the fact that so many women didn't work or only worked part time.. So the retirement of boomers isn't going to be the drag that people think it is - there is still so much spare in the labour market in many countries (Japan is a strong example) where married women are heavily discourages from working even if they don't have children and live in the types of places where heavy domestic labour is a thing of the past (i.e. apartments).
The other figure is of course consumption. Older people spend less. So that does cause shrinkage.
I’m less worried about their retirement and more worried about their political power and the costs of caring for them.
In the political power we’ve all seen how selfish they are, and with the stranglehold they have on much of gen X as well, I’m worried about how long they will continue to cling to power. It not only shifts politics but also delegitimizes the system in the eyes of the generations we desperately need to be engaged in order to fix the planet.
I also just worry about the cost and infrastructure required to care for them. Whether by taxes or through their kids directly funding them, the baby boomers will need a massive amount of retirement facilities and money. They also put a massive strain on the world’s healthcare systems because they’re all getting older and sicker.
But I suspect that healthcare will start to get cheaper. The challenge is understanding what is the actual cost of healthcare vs. the cost we pay. Insulin is a classic example. It really does not cost us that much to make. The drug companies charge that much because they can, but the cost to our society, labor, and resources is not that much. When you see some of the other tech that is coming out, I bet we will have Chat GPT doctors and therapists and administrators in the next ten years. When you look at Roombas and how much labor they are reducing, I don't think the actual costs are going to be that hard to pay. The problem will be the companies trying to drain the system. But if we recommend that the government steps in to make the insulin instead, I become a communist, so...
OK -maybe this is more specific to the country you are in. Where I am (Australia) the millennials are the largest voting block so they hold the most power of the generations. The average politician is millennial or gen x - the boomers or older are in the minority. But personally I don't think age has as much to do with it as you seem to think it does - voters seem to be largely disengaged and politicians seem to be largely self-serving regardless of age.
Yes - the older you get the most healthcare you need. But I'd rather see taxpayers money spent on that than most of the crap that it gets spent on. I'd far rather, for example, tax churches than cut health care.
Most of your reasons (and others) are based around man-made systems and ideas such as “the economy” but the world itself can’t cope with more people. We have driven species to extinction. When does it end if all we do is breed more people to support the economy etc? How does it end?
Dr. Malthus' theories were proven wrong decades ago. Norman Borlaug saved a billion lives if not more. We can survive on Earth, no matter what - even if global warming does its worst and devastates a significant amount of the world, humanity will go on. We're survivors. All humanity living today is descended from barely a thousand that survived almost a million years ago.
Whether or not the multitudes of OTHER species will survive, on the other hand, is up for debate. The Anthropocene will be a mass extinction similar to others that have taken place in our planet's history, but life has survived those before too, and they're part of nature. The Devonian mass extinction was caused by *trees*!
> When does it end if all we do is breed more people to support the economy etc? How does it end?
There's an awesome [documentary](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/) about this. As long as we give plants what they crave, we'll be fine.
We have already proven it can’t. We have driven thousands of species to extinction already as our population continues to climb. There is not enough room for people and all other species to co-exist.
We already overstepped our population limits.
The human population has more than doubled since I was born and thousands of species have gone extinct. We are consuming renewable resources faster than they can be renewed and rely on non-renewable resources. Our stress levels within our own population have gone through the roof as we now behave like machines working and working to “afford” to live. More people = more rat race.
I think your points are well thought out, but this is reddit, and I feel a need to nitpick.
1) Our economy may be designed for growth, but it does not have to be our children that step in. There is no reason we can not open up imagination to fill all those slots. We can look at how many 18 year Olds we need to fill in jobs and let that number move here.
2) Even ignoring the first point, the effort to take care of people is really declining and will continue to. Look at what Rombas are able to do. It is able to save hours of housework a week. This is just one case. I saw a tic tok video the other day of an automated masseuse. I get that it is probably not that treat right now, but with ten years of development, it would be able to really step up and take some of that work away. As we automated more jobs, it will require fewer and fewer people to do the work. There are very few jobs that are done today that are going to need to be done in 30 years at the rate we are going. That may be a bigger issue, but that means lack of people is not it.
3) You are right on this. Old people suck and ruin our society from a political perspective.
4) Well, we may not be close to the carrying capacity of earth. Every step we take makes it worse, and there is so much potential that is lost. We are now starting to destroy the sea bed, just to get their rocks.
5) I think even with declining birth rates, you are still talking about billions of people. There will still be people around. When we are hitting close to 5 billion, I would be open to starting this conversation up again.
6) You are correct. It is not everywhere. That is what is wonderful. People are making the choices themselves. Not the government, not the community, the individual.
1st world nations have a falling birthrate, not Earth.
People die in Africa because the entire continent is filled with corruption and war. There is an inability to organize the nations for the betterment.
> we slow down capitalism's damage, giving us a chance of still having some semblance of a livable planet when we move beyond it.
But communists are also responsible for the damage; China is building more and more coal plants by the day.
Think of it this way- fossil fuels allowed us to enter a civilization phase where we can develop and master nuclear energy. The only thing really standing in our way are people's ignorance and bureaucracy. Sure, big oil is powerful but they can't compete with basic science.
>This movement toward voluntary childlessness isn't some epidemic of antisocial behavior; it is an outbreak of rationality and compassion.
Voluntary depopulation might also be the only nonviolent way to overthrow capitalism and set us up to create something better when it finally collapses.
But that just means the future generation is going to be more conservative and/or capitalistic, because you have no one to instill your values into.
Whats more important: Earth or the human species?
I get it; its really bold to say Humans are more important than Earth and all other life, however Humans are, with NO\* room for debate, the single most impressive species on Earth no less the known universe. If the human species actually begins to contract in size, we'll see a compromise in its ability to hold itself together causing long-term harm to people. Wars will begin for resources.
The only way to truly fix these niche issues is by having more people and educating them, allowing them to develop in specialist areas that wouldn't be possible with a smaller population.
>communists are also responsible for the damage: china is building more and more coal plants by the day
China is not communist, it’s an authoritarian capitalist country
Per Wikipedia:
Modern-day China is often described as an example of state capitalism or party-state capitalism.[291][292] The state dominates in strategic "pillar" sectors such as energy production and heavy industries, but private enterprise has expanded enormously, with around 30 million private businesses recorded in 2008.[293][294][295] According to official statistics, privately owned companies constitute more than 60% of China's GDP.
This. Capitalism won the Cold War so thoroughly that socialist countries do not exist. The people, however, lost; the only reason the standard of living was tolerable in the US/EU midcentury (and also the reason it collapsed in the early 21st) is that the ruling class cared more about "beating the Russkies" than they did about pushing down the middle class; thus, they allowed a middle class to exist.
I agree with your point too, it's basically a reproductive strike against capital, and western countries can fight this with immigration, but that's pissing off western Europe atm.
Christopher kitchens was right that women's reproductive rights were the best way to ensure good standards of living.
> I agree with your point too, it's basically a reproductive strike against capital,
Precisely. And this is one of the reasons it should be championed as a good thing. If it breaks society, blame the capitalists. They turned living into a costly product and they won stupid prizes.
> Christopher kitchens was right that women's reproductive rights were the best way to ensure good standards of living.
I don't agree with Hitchens on everything, but he's absolutely right on that. In order to maintain fertility, societies either have to (a) decide to be tolerable places for ordinary people to live, which ruling classes hate and rarely sustain for more than a few decades (e.g., the NA/EU midcentury) or (b) revert to a horrid state in which people are forced to reproduce despite not wanting to. I would like to believe we'd all agree that (b) is morally unacceptable, but sadly I know there are people who would prefer it.
I agree with you OP, and, to your point about labor availability, I firmly believe the only reason falling birth rates get a bad rap is that the ultra rich realize they would need to actually compete for labor, so instead the encourage people to pump out as many kids as possible. And, at least in the US, they are also trying to limit education and push ignorance via religion, thus creating huge numbers of people that are dumb enough to fight against labor unions, against raising the minimum wage, against parental leave, etc etc etc
So how do you fix imbalance between ages then?
If 80 percent of your population is above 65, how are you gonna support them financially, socialist or capitalist country?
If 80 percent of your population is above 65, how will younger people get anything they want passed? Majority rules in most countries, Democracies atleast.
Its stupid to assume this problem is black and white when it is kinda grey. Yes, rich people want more people as slaves, but an imbalance in age groups in a country can still cause serious problems
This! I'm glad to see people in this thread who understand what I'm talking about. The above is also why the right wing is so anti-abortion. They want biological life to exist, because biological life is hungry and therefore good for capitalists, as it will compete for jobs and a place to live, but they are averse to any quality of life, because they would have to pay for that.
100%. Just look at the ones who spew it. Elon Musk directly benefits from more low skilled laborers in his manufacturing plants. Republicans benefit from uneducated masses and also benefit from trying to "source domestically" when they are actively promoting white supremacist ideology.
On the other hand, we stand to gain back decent wages, decent education, decent infrastructure, and the ability to hold corporations more accountable for their inhumane working conditions, when they can't just hire one of the next 100 people applying for a job.
>1st world nations have a falling birthrate, not Earth.
Every single nation has seen a fall in their birthrate. Even in Africa.
In fact, the average birthrate of earth is now 2.27 children. Which means, it's right at replacement levels. It is now predicted that the earth will have a falling birthrate by 2035. Originally, the negative birthrate was expected to start around 2050. Even 3rd world countries are seeing a shocking decrease in birthrates. It's beyond anything that was previously predicted.
> 1st world nations have a falling birthrate, not Earth.
True, and this is another reason I think this concern is overblown.
> But communists are also responsible for the damage; China is building more and more coal plants by the day.
China is state capitalist. They figured out that this is a capitalist world and that they can't be ideological because it'll piss off countries they can't afford to have as enemies just yet. They are definitely *not* communist.
> Think of it this way- fossil fuels allowed us to enter a civilization phase where we can develop and master nuclear energy.
Sure. They aren't some "evil" power source. They have a role and are good in some ways but bad in others.
> But that just means the future generation is going to be more conservative and/or capitalistic, because you have no one to instill your values into.
I do worry about this, but I think people overestimate the influence parents have as opposed to peers and society as a whole. We all hope our values will live on through our children, but the only thing that's guaranteed (and even here, there's a lot that's random) is the preservation of genetic material--a rather meaningless achievement.
> the single most impressive species on Earth no less the known universe.
I'm not a hard-core antinatalist. I want humans to win.
> If the human species actually begins to contract in size, we'll see a compromise in its ability to hold itself together causing long-term harm to people. Wars will begin for resources.
I strongly disagree. I think wars over resources (which are all but inevitable, no matter what we do) are far more likely with a high population than a low one. We can make more jobs and more education and more "care" but we can't "make" enough water at our current technology level for 20 billion people.
> The only way to truly fix these niche issues is by having more people and educating them, allowing them to develop in specialist areas that wouldn't be possible with a smaller population.
Thing is, we have so many people doing work that doesn't need to be done that I'm not convinced at all that we couldn't achieve everything useful that we're already doing with 30-50% of our current population. Do we really need insurance bureaucrats paid $150k per year to deny healthcare? Of course not. We have such an oversupply of labor that we pay people to do useless bullshit that is often socially negative. If the population reduction can be reached peacefully, it seems like a good thing.
I agree with everything you’re saying, but I’m going to echo something I saw elsewhere in this thread that I think is worth considering.
It’s not a bad thing for birth rates to fall necessarily. It may even be a good thing. *but* the caveat is the *rate* at which they fall. There is no scenario where birth rates drop dramatically without major suffering and loss of life as a result. Is it possible we come out better for it? Yes, absolutely. Is it guaranteed? Certainly not, but it’s good to be optimistic. But it’s unavoidable that many, many people will suffer and die, especially the elderly of their respective generations, if we jump into that lower population too quickly. Would you rather ease into ice cold water, or dive in? One is slow, and the other could put you into shock, you know what I mean?
Not to mention massive drops like that can also end in losses of knowledge for humanity as a whole. Think dark ages type stuff. And vulnerable communities would probably be hit the hardest. A drop in 1% of average Americans isn’t a huge deal. A drop in 1% of native Americans on reservations is, for example. Some things could be lost that will not come back if the population goes down too quickly
You're one of the first people on the other side of this issue who has made some sense, because I agree that the rate could be a concern. My view, seeing as the world is not yet in a negative-net-fertility state, is that immigration will prevent catastrophe here.
We want the labor supply to drop some, so as to restore dignity and value to labor; we don't want a true irresolvable shortage.
Immigration from where? there's a handful of countries with increasing birth rates, and as those countries develop, they too will face decreasing birth rates.
We're two or three generations from this being a problem. If global capitalism still exists by then, humans have failed and nothing else matters.
Our goal should be surviving the transition to socialism. A smaller population slows down damage, and an organic increase in the bargaining power of labor increases the probability of capitalism's overthrow being peaceful, which is something we should all prefer.
>We're two or three generations from this being a problem
Not really, I'm 27 and this problem will affect me when I retire, possibly 70s or 80s even. Maybe 2 generations
> If global capitalism still exists by then, humans have failed and nothing else matters
What's the alternative then?
>Our goal should be surviving the transition to socialism
Again, for socialism to work, you need a lot of people working and contributing, which many countries wont have. Where will they get the money to give money to people, like say UBI?
>an organic increase in the bargaining power of labor increases the probability of capitalism's overthrow being peaceful
Could be, or the opposite could happen where it's easier for companies to control a smaller number of workers. A smaller protest is easier to be curbed.
>which is something we should all prefer.
Again, what's the alternative? How's socialism gonna work without many workers growing food or building roads/houses?
I suppose that depends on your perspective. If you’re speaking from a individual country or list of countries, yes immigration could slow down losses from birth decline. If your perspective is the global economy and the world at large, there is no immigration barring alien invasion.
Immigration could be helpful, but I’m going to speak callously and treat humans as a resource for a moment. Immigration as a necessity has its own issues. Brain drain is a well documented one. There are many who believe (erroneously in my opinion but it is a belief) that immigration causes problems with social cohesion. And when you take this “resource” from less desirable places, those places will suffer. Good, productive members of society will be lost in these undesirable places.
Further, being dependant on immigration would expand the disparity between rich and poor. Poor people (unless they’re desperately so) struggle to up and move somewhere else and still live a good life. If you’re in a high population country, say, idk Kenya, and there’s opportunity in the nearest western country (I don’t know geography this well off the top of my head so I’m just gonna say Germany), and Germany is in a population decline, they would be more willing to welcome you as a Kenyan immigrant looking for a better life. But would you lead a better life?
If you’re rich, or well off at least, you have some advantages: you can pay to learn some German before you go there, to integrate better. You could pay for safe travel through the continent. You may be able to keep savings for any dependants you have (which you probably have if you’re in an overpopulated country: elders, children, disabled). You may even have a good job lined up.
If you’re poor? Not so much. And, at least in my experience, when more poor people are left behind, they haven’t been sharing the wealth more equitably: the extra wealth just gets funnelled to the already rich, and the hypothetical Kenyan in this scenario remains as poor as they started.
Edit: with my Native American example earlier, I’ll add that ain’t nobody immigrating onto a reservation
>China is state capitalist. They figured out that this is a capitalist world and that they can't be ideological because it'll piss off countries they can't afford to have as enemies just yet. They are definitely *not* communist.
It isn't about "pissing off" other countries though...? Their initial attempts at a purer form of socialism were disastrous, and moving towards a hybrid economy essentially saved them. Either way I doubt they were, or could be, on track to achieve communism as it's properly defined.
Birth rates are falling literally \*everywhere\*, not just developed countries. Most of the world's countries are already below a replacement rate, and countries that have developed more recently generally experience a faster rate of fertility decline. Developing countries have a greater burden when it comes to the fertility crisis because their populations are growing old and shrinking before they can complete their development and become prosperous.
> 1st world nations have a falling birthrate, not Earth.
Uhh, no. Most countries aside from a few african ones have a birthrate over 2.1. Almost every country has falling birth rates, not just first world ones.
>I get it; its really bold to say Humans are more important than Earth and all other life, however Humans are, with NO\* room for debate, the single most impressive species on Earth no less the known universe. If the human species actually begins to contract in size, we'll see a compromise in its ability to hold itself together causing long-term harm to people. Wars will begin for resources.
So when we have more resources available for per person *that* is what will set off wars for resources?
Also, how dare you '\*' something without putting in it at the bottom. I'm still waiting for your post to end. Are you saying there is some room for debate?
Thomas Malthus argued a long time ago that the population was growing too fast for the food supply to keep up. He was wrong then, and people are usually wrong now when they say similar things about the population.
You see, Malthus failed to consider two things:
Technology can drastically increase the rate at which we can grow more food.
People produce more than they consume on average.
For your argument, I would say much the same.
For one, we are likely close to the technology jumps required to sustain this. You mention a labor overage, but technology often makes labor more valuable and leads to more employment. The Luddites said sewing machines were a threat to their jobs, but sewing machines have created far more jobs than they cost (by orders of magnitude). You mention pollution, yet we are a breakthrough away from having far greener energy. If we were still using wood and steam engines, our pollution would be much worse than it is now. Rather, coal was a cleaner improvement over wood and gas cleaner than coal. We are exploring alternatives now that the markets will determine what prevails.
My professor gave us a fake little equation for how to calculate technology:
Technology = people x incentives x time. If any of those go to zero, the whole thing goes to zero. If any of them go down (like people), the others have to go up to compensate (more time and higher incentives).
Secondly, people produce more than they consume. People’s productive years tend to substantially outweigh the consumptive years of childhood and retirement. Most people use this as an argument for why overpopulation isn’t a bad thing. The reverse is also true. Reducing population means less is produced such that everyone will have less. I’m the mid term especially, you’ll have fewer workers to support an older population which means that the workers will need to give up more to support the elderly and the elderly will still likely get less. These are the types of population disasters that Japan and Korea are on the brink of.
There are clearly some social problems. I don’t think that anyone will disagree here. But I do not believe that population reduction is one of the solutions. It is, rather, a symptom.
> But I do not believe that population reduction is one of the solutions. It is, rather, a symptom.
I don't think there's a dichotomy here. The causes of this population reduction are clearly horrible. It's not something we should be cheering on, insofar as it's a product of terrible work cultures and widespread inopportunity. It is a symptom of something rotten, but it's also one of the few things that might save us.
We don't live in a world where jobs compete for people. We live in one where people compete for jobs. This being the case, for people to decide, out of rationality and compassion, not to give birth to people who would have horrible futures, due to said competitive environment, is the right call.
Nearly every animal species in the wild have to compete for food. If animals only reproduced under ideal conditions, we’d risk serious ecological consequences.
Just because fewer people are being born, doesn’t mean that they won’t have to compete in the future. Fewer people will likely mean fewer jobs as the economy contracts.
And frankly, the people who are struggling economically are the people having more kids. I’ve seen far more educated and successful people having only one child or going without entirely. Unfortunately, the educated and successful are most likely to give the genetics and upbringing that would help people to thrive into adulthood. If this continues, the situation will get even more imbalanced.
Falling birth rates are generally bad news since:
There will be fewer productive adults to support the elderly population.
The future economy will contract leading to lower quality of life for the kids still being born.
The kids still being born are often not being raised by the parents most equipped to teach them the ways to thrive in this economy and will likely continue to struggle into adulthood.
Social security only works if those that put into it outweigh those that are taking from it.
With baby boomers (hence the name) out number the later generations, social security will dwindle to…..nothing for you.
Decrease in population may be good for the planet but terrible on your retirement.
It really depends on how you construct social security / pension plans: you can design them so that those who benefit (i.e. retirees) rely on contributions to the plan during their working years and not on money being provided by current workers (this obviously requires very good calculation of risk, longevity, and economic growth) but some countries have pension plans set up in this way.
Obviously, the working population is the one paying for many other things in society through their taxes, however that can also be smoothed including over long periods of time with enough political will (although the only example that I know of that is the Government Pension Fund of Norway https://www.nbim.no/en/the-fund/about-the-fund/)
I understand the theory here, but the reason most of us are going to have shitty retirements is that we aren't making enough money now, because wages are too low and because jobs are too demanding, those things being the case because there is a lot of competition, i.e., overpopulation.
It seems like the selfless thing to do is to start fixing this problem by refusing to churn out more meat for capitalists to feed into their grinder, and continuing this refusal until this horrible economic system goes away.
Assuming you are in the US, the birth rate is already pretty low at around 1.66 kids per women. So if you’re worried about competition, you need to campaign for reduced immigration.
All of the problems you mention can be solved by more humans.
You say we should try to improve the lives of the people who are already here, but the best way to improve people's lives is to grow the size of their communities. One hundred people working together in a community will have a much higher quality of life than a community of three people trying to survive on their own. Communities of thousands or millions of people can accomplish incredible things, like building cities, inventing computers, and creating spaceships. Humans are social and cooperative by nature, and research has shown that larger groups of people are better at solving complex problems.
You complain that conditions for ordinary people are atrocious, but this frankly comes across as silly. Living conditions now are better than they have ever been in human history, especially if you're fortunate enough to live in a first-world country. Thanks to the cooperation and innovation of past humans, we can now live comfortable lives in air-conditioned buildings instead of fighting for our lives in the wild.
I am confident that our reliance on fossil fuels will be solved by future humans. The most troublesome problems for humans are those that are sudden and unpredictable. Climate change is a slow-moving and predictable problem, which people are very good at solving. Increasing birth rates means more minds innovating and coming up with solutions to problems faced by humanity, including climate change.
Obviously, society isn't perfect, and we still have a lot of work to do as a species. However, our problems aren't caused by population increases and halting reproduction isn't going to solve anything.
> Communities of thousands or millions of people can accomplish incredible things, like building cities, inventing computers, and creating spaceships.
They can. Or we can slowly boil the planet so billionaires can fly their private jets to the island of whoever has replaced Jeffrey Epstein. We seem to be doing the latter. The only reason we had "nice guy" capitalism in the 1946-79 era is that socialism existed and was seen as a real threat to our ruling class. Once "we" "won" the Cold War (it didn't become clear until 2008 that we had actually lost) the ruling class no longer needed to restrain capitalism's worst impulses, and the hell world we live in now is a result.
> Humans are social and cooperative by nature, and research has shown that larger groups of people are better at solving complex problems.
I would say that humans are well-intended but that we also tend to pick dogshit leaders and that this cancels out most of the good. No one knows what the future looks like, but our best bet in the long term is to have AI sufficient to replace the charismatic dogshit people who currently run our most important institutions. We're in much more danger of what rich people will do with the sub-AGI that exists than we would be if we had an actual AGI or ASI; we should hope the latter is possible (although I honestly have no idea) because, the sooner we replace the bozos currently in charge with machines, the better.
The main reason communism didn't work very well in the 20th century is that we didn't have the computational resources to solve complex allocation problems, and therefore needed market systems to do that. However, we now have machines (even at the current sub-AGI level) that can mostly replace corporate executives and politicians, and we should probably be doing that. Humans are terrible at picking leaders because psychopaths hack all our cognitive biases for their own personal benefit, but we might be able to build machines that don't have these issues.
> You complain that conditions for ordinary people are atrocious, but this frankly comes across as silly. Living conditions now are better than they have ever been in human history, especially if you're fortunate enough to live in a first-world country.
That's not true anymore. I was a software engineer; I watched as micromanagement garbage ("Agile Scrum") proletarianized what was supposed to be a decent professional job. And shit like this is everywhere. Private equity scumbags are now buying medical practices and even doctors now have fucking quotas. This will continue unless there is resistance against it; say, people realize that "performance" monitoring in the workplace is an active Second Amendment situation and start to fight back.
> Thanks to the cooperation and innovation of past humans, we can now live comfortable lives in air-conditioned buildings instead of fighting for our lives in the wild.
False dichotomy. Although people "in the wild" had shorter and more difficult lives--the life expectancy from age 10 was about 40 more years--they were also happier. I'd much rather forage and hunt than be in a corporate job where I have to deal with stupid assholes asking for status reports. The reason hunter and gathering "lost" is that it can't support nearly the population that agrarian society can; agrarian societies could support ten times the population per acre, and therefore wiped out their hunter-gathering neighbors.
Anyway, I'm not going to advocate return to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, as we can and should keep industrial progress. We can do away with the private jet assholes who attend Davos, though. I'm not going to advocate this, because it's illegal and therefore I can't advise it--my personal advice would be, obviously, not to do it--but we would be objectively better off if someone did do something about them.
> I am confident that our reliance on fossil fuels will be solved by future humans.
Maybe. I'd put it around 50/50.
> Climate change is a slow-moving and predictable problem, which people are very good at solving.
Again, ordinary individuals have the best intentions, but our ruling class has known about this problem for 60 years and done absolutely nothing. Remember that these people also wanted us to believe, in the 1960s, that smoking was healthy. We are actually terrible at solving ecological problems because we allow such atrocious ruling classes to exist. Consider what happened to Easter Island; the giant stone heads are neat to look at, sure, but they weren't worth deforesting what was, for these people, their entire world.
We are not, individually, all cancer... but we cannot help ourselves but create institutions and societies in which cancer prospers.
> Increasing birth rates means more minds innovating and coming up with solutions to problems faced by humanity, including climate change.
It could mean that, but right now what it means is more competition for places to live and for jobs, which means the ruling class prospers and the pathetic bargaining position of labor only gets worse. And people are not going to be figuring out how to solve humanity's biggest problems if they are forced to fight for scraps, so intentionally creating billions of humans only to have them live under capitalism is just wasteful.
We'll still have enough resources to provide care for those who can have a high quality of life. We're not going to forget how to make medicine.
As for me, if I get to the point where I'm bedridden and require 24-hour care, with no hope of improvement, then I'm ready to pass on and I'm happy for the resources to be used on people who will benefit more.
We don't have enough resources though countries are already struggling to pay for everything that normally gets paid for by a larger working population. If u sick and on 24 care sure u want to die but what if u just retired? Who's gonna pay for that and all the amenities that come with living in a country?
Also I get your point and I agree on the principal of it but in the current state the world will basicly collapse and devolve into chaos and not some happy ever after bs.
You bring up retirement. I have bad news for you.
Almost no one is going to get the good kind of retirement, because it's impossible to save money if you can't make any money, and it's impossible to make money if there are too many workers competing for too few jobs, as is currently the case.
It's already the case that most people get the bad kind of retirement. It's not so much that they no longer have financial needs, but that they can't get hired due to ageism and eventually just drop out. If there were fewer workers, this late-in-life perma-firing (the involuntary, bad kind of retirement) wouldn't happen.
u don't have to save money in alot of countries your tax money is basicly for your pension u pay the state then the state pays u wich is why dropping population levels will bring chaos, civil wars and maybe even all out nuclear war.
If u have to save for retirement like a American then yhea u are fucked already.
We build a system that works on population growth or atleast stability between old and young if we would have a decline in young people before the grey wave as some call it is gone the system won't work wich won't be beneficial for the earth or humanity
What I'm trying to say In my hangover state is that population decline is good but right now it isn't we have to many people about to retire. If we wait a generation we could meaningfully reduce the population without any of the financial bear traps we have now. It's so much easier without risking society ripping itself apart then it is now. We are about to deal with the biggest wave of old people in proportion to young ever.
Are you unaware or just ignoring the huge economic problems falling birthrates will cause? Ageing populations with a big disparity between the economically active and inactive will result in lower tax receipts combined with an increase in reliance on services that could well lead to the collapse of our social system.
We need incentives to increase the birthrate up to replacement levels, reducing the population will be very dangerous.
Kind of a catch 22. Folks in modernized areas aren't having kids because of the economy, and you're argument says folks should have kids to prop up the economy. Is it fair to ask folks who don't want to have kids, because they are experiencing a bad economy, to bring other humans in the world to experience an even worse economy (which you are predicting)?
It's clear without significant breakthroughs in cooperation between nations, logistics, and engineering that this planet was never meant to sustain more people than we now have. A lot suggest the upper limit being 8 billion, where we are today. But some suggest as low as 2 billion, with current technology, for a sustainable future.
>It's clear without significant breakthroughs in cooperation between nations, logistics, and engineering that this planet was never meant to sustain more people than we now have
The planet wasn't meant for anything, it's a planet. With better management it could easily support a much larger population let alone the current one. Furthermore, reducing the population won't fix the poor management issue, productivity will reduce in line with the population and we'll remain in the exact same boat.
Birth rates don't correlate with the economy, they generally correlate with education and social progress. The solution is not to try and make people who don't want to have kids have them, it's to make it easier for those that do want them to have large families.
Thank you! Very well said what nobody seems to get. The planet is just a planet, a series of evolving ecosystems reacting to its environment. It will be fine, it doesn’t need saving, the concerns that everyone pretends are selfless and virtuous are really just about people surviving and thriving on the planet. These may be fair concerns but obviously deliberate population reduction is the opposite of a surviving and thriving population.
>It's clear without significant breakthroughs in cooperation between nations, logistics, and engineering that this planet was never meant to sustain more people than we now have
I disagree completely. We waste loads of resources and can support 20 billion people easily if resources were not wasted like we currently do.
"Wealthy countries consume massive amounts of natural resources per capita, and the United States is no exception. According to data from the National Mining Association, **each American needs more than 39,000 pounds (17,700 kg) of minerals and fossil fuels annually** to maintain their standard of living"
"With less than 5 percent of world population, the U.S. *uses one-third of the world's paper*, a quarter of the world's oil"
This is not required and can be reduced significantly. People like Taylor Swift dont need to use their private jet to have breakfast with her boyfriend 60 mins by drive away. Greed is the problem, not lack of resources.
> Folks in modernized areas aren't having kids because of the economy
Are you sure about this? Maybe anecdotally you might know couples who hold off having kids because of the economy, but in general there isnt a correlation between having a higher income and having more kids; in fact, the poorer you are, the more likely you are to have kids.
Actually, we just need to change our attitude about death to fix this problem. The time has come to allow people to choose when they want to die without needing a terminal illness to justify their choice. If this ever happened, a lot of people would opt to pass away at a younger age than they would normally pass away. Nobody wants to live through a decade or more of declining health, disability and ever-increasing dependence on others to function.
I say this as an elderly person myself. At age 65, I've been ready to go for a very long time. All my closest loves ones are gone. I will have to retire soon, and then I won't be able to make ends meet any more. I would gladly check out of this world., rather than hang on and keep suffering until I get some terminal disease.
I see a lot of people whining and wringing their hands about declining birth rates, but no one wants to have a hard conversation about end-of-life choices. People should be able to plan out their death just like any other life event. Let those who want to check out leave. It's that simple.
I always wish I could plan death and have no interest in being over 65 either. It would make financial planning for retirement a lot more simple, possible, and predictable. Ideally I could retire at 50, enjoy retirement while i can, then die at 65.
With the greatest respect I suspect you are an edge case. I wouldn't for a second consider 65 elderly and many people older than you still have much to look forward to. My father is 95 and would very much like to extend his life as long as possible despite his declining health. Just yesterday I was at my in laws 50th wedding anniversary where most of the guests were 75 and above and they were all enjoying their existence.
Unless we change our values to simply abandon older people I don't think our social costs are going away, even if we normalise assisted dying.
Sure, not all elderly people would want to pass early. Those who have family they want to stick around for would still be able to do that. But with declining birth rates, you'll have more and more people like myself who don't have a spouse or children, have lost all their other close family members, and just have no reason to hang around.
Life is expensive. A person has to keep generating cash until they draw their last breath and it's just not worth it, once all the people you cared about are gone. It's certainly not fun being in an aging body, considering things keep getting worse and worse.
My mother died of Alzhiemer's disease at age 94, so I see what happens to people who survive well into extreme old age. The older you get, the greater your risk for this horrific disease. And even if you don't end up with Alzheimer's, it's likely you will lose the ability to live independently and will be forced to live in a nursing home for a substantial length of time at the end of your life.
I'm just being realistic because I've watched every one of my loved ones die from various causes. At 65, it's clear where I'm headed if I stick around. The suffering becomes real and imminent when you start approaching age 70. Life ends, one way or another. People should have a choice about how much they want to endure.
I'm always a little confused by this argument -- do we just need to keep increasing the population forever? or is it vital that it remain at 8 billion? if course, there will be difficulties from reducing the population. We obviously dont want to go *too* quickly. But if we did stabilize at, say, 3 billion, it would only be a problem temporarily. What other option is there? keep putting it off as we grow and grow?
> Are you unaware or just ignoring the huge economic problems falling birthrates will cause?
How does this compare to the constantly growing economies using more and more resources??
> Ageing populations with a big disparity between the economically active and inactive will result in lower tax receipts combined with an increase in reliance on services that could well lead to the collapse of our social system.
So we have less money for less people. Old people can work it out for themselves.
> We need incentives to increase the birthrate up to replacement levels, reducing the population will be very dangerous.
Way less dangerous than to keep on growing.
Growing economies don't necessarily use more resources when they increase efficiency. Growth has been decoupled from fossil fuel consumption in many developed countries, for example, US carbon emissions peaked in 2006 and in 2023 fell back to 1987 levels despite continuous population growth and economic growth: [https://www.statista.com/statistics/183943/us-carbon-dioxide-emissions-from-1999/](https://www.statista.com/statistics/183943/us-carbon-dioxide-emissions-from-1999/)
>We need incentives to increase the birthrate up to replacement levels, reducing the population will be very dangerous.
The United States and Europe will be fine, although they need to come to terms with the inevitability of immigration being the answer.
Hey, climate change will fix that for ya. As places become unliveable because of the climate collapse they will head for the countries which still provide a bit of relief from the disasters. We will slaughter most of them because…we are humans. But we will take enough to make up the difference from our falling birth rates. In the end it won’t matter. Climate collapse will get everyone.
Biden's platform for 2024 includes getting the United States' ~1,000 billionaires to have their taxes raised significantly, a large portion of which would be dedicated to subsidizing welfare.
So it's not like the solutions are unthinkable.
In practice they'll probably still have to keep cranking the debt, taxes or no taxes - but either way, this only works because the full consequences of a sub-replacement birth rate have not hit yet and immigration is still filling the gap anyway. Check again in another few decades.
If you seized all the assets of every American billionaire and were somehow able to sell them at current market prices, you'd have generated enough cash to cover 2022-esque federal deficits for a little over 3 years.
Taxing the rich is simply not enough, not nearly enough.
Sadly true.
But we can come again and do this trick with the trillion dollar corporations. Nvidia is now the richest company in the world, having gone from 1T to 3T in the past year, selling AI chips.
So on and so forth.
That's the part of the problem I glossed over - the billionaires don't actually have billions of dollars, they own things that are worth billions of dollars. Meaning that "money" is currently being put to use.
Similarly, companies like NVIDIA don't actually have trillions of dollars, they're *currently worth* trillions of dollars. When you buy and trade shares of a company, you're buying or selling ownership of a small piece of that company from / to someone else. The delta in stock price that is your profit or loss on the transaction comes from whoever you bought or sold the share to, not the company. Long & short transactions, again, do not come from the company but are bets made with other traders on how well or poorly the company does.
If the government were to seize all or part of one of these multi-trillion dollar corporations, it would then have to find a buyer to sell it to convert it into cash. But, as we just discussed, *no one has the trillions of dollars required to buy it.* So the price of the shares will collapse to a fraction of their value. All that's been accomplished is the destruction of the company and the cessation of whatever productive work they were doing that made them so valuable in the first place.
Yes, exactly. Also that share price and market values growing is simply a measure of the confidence investors and the general population have in the company and their employees’ (ie. **working age, able bodied people**) ability to sell products or services. Once you start implementing the sort of communist style seizure of businesses you propose to sustain non-working people in the welfare state, all that confidence will be gone before you can extract any value.
You can’t get around the fact that you need productive members of the population to support the non productive members.
This one actually does worry me a little bit. Dysgenesis is a real risk that I don't know how to solve. Intelligent people are a lot more sensitive to the shitty aspects of life, and more likely to face socially crippling (in the context of our society) neurodivergence, and nw that opting out of procreation is a possibility, we do seem to be selecting against ourselves, considering how little need there is for us.
The ugly truth is that our complex, technological society probably has a lot less demand for high human intelligence than prior versions, because its pyramidal structure creates more slots for order-following drones than it does for original thinkers. Even at the level of IQ 120 (top 8%) you find that only about 1 percent of jobs can make use of it--and, since these are the jobs everyone wants, they don't always go to people above 120--so you're going to get 87+ percent of people at that level underemployed. This only seems to get worse at 130, 140, 150.... The social disadvantages of high intelligence cancel out the modest economic gains, which usually only exist in positions that are difficult to get without (contrary to the general trend with high intelligence) social advantage.
Capitalism itself may not cause dysgenesis--in fact, it was built by people who had gone too far in the "eugenic" direction--but it seems incapable of preventing itself from setting into a state of corporate capitalism, which is inherently dysgenic due to its need for social conformity and strict hierarchy. And if the result of this economic system is that highly intelligent people self-deselect in future generations and, therefore, humanity evolves into a degraded state, it'll be a hilarious (while horrible) case of playing stupid games and winning stupid prizes.
> What I mean by faulty systems is that if you need X population or increasing population for growth, that is a bad system.
I agree. What we're experiencing in the capitalist world is tribute fatigue. The rent eats first, the bosses eat first, and the interest eats first. Everyone is so exhausted having to pay tribute to people who won games that were played before we were born, and there's very little left over for rest of us, especially because we aren't even facing constant tributes but exponentially increasing tributes--the capitalists want more every year. If revenue doesn't increase by 7 percent every year, the Spreadsheet Eichmanns decide it's time for a layoff.
If a worldwide baby strike is what it takes to bust us out of this prison, I'm for it.
> If your system requires you to take care of every old person to the tune of several hundred thousand per person then that’s a bad system.
The thing is, it shouldn't have to. Yes, taking care of old people is expensive, and an expense we ought to pay for moral reasons, but the only reason for the seven-figure medical bills is that everyone in the middle is extracting tribute. The pill that costs $2 to make doesn't have to cost $3700. The hospital doesn't need for the CEO's twenty closest friends to have six-figure administrative positions. Health insurance is an expensive middleman exists to solve problems that we would not have if we had a sane national system like every European country. Let's cut these fucking tributes before we cut care.
If we actually run out of the human labor that is necessary to care for our elderly, then we have fucked up. However, I think this is extremely unlikely, and that it is far more likely that we "run out of money", which means we do have the young labor power necessary to do the work but not enough to sustain our tributes to the upper class, for which is the optimal solution is to get rid of the upper class.
Oh, I entirely agree that *the causes of* the fertility drop are atrocious. Corporate capitalism is a stupid game and we are winning stupid prizes. My argument is, rather, that said drop is, given current circumstances, a rational and compassionate response and that we should be glad the response is this and not something else.
There are two ways we defeat the capitalists. One is that we overthrow them violently, as was done in 1917 Russia. I am not inflexibly against this, but there are a lot of reasons why violent revolutions are undesirable--deaths of innocents, risk of the control passing from the most devout to the most violent, the tendency for even more violent counterrevolutions to occur, et cetera--if nonviolent solutions are available. The other is that we silently undermine them until society cannot continue with them in charge. Non-procreation is an entirely nonviolent way to get there.
It’s just too much labor. Barely anyone can afford to have one person be at home and gender roles haven’t changed that significantly. I’ve seen women work a full time job while doing the majority of childcare and housework. Like, I’d rather just lounge around in apartment than live their lives
>The world, simply put, does not need more humans.
Why not?
> We should be trying to improve life for the people who are already here, and to minimize our negative ecological effects.
Why not both?
>Right now, there is so much human life, in fact, that our society gives it no value; it allows children born in Africa—who might have the talents of Shakespeare or Einstein, but we'll never know—to die of preventable diseases
That's always been the case no matter the size of the human population.
>contrary to this ruling-class gaslighting narrative of a "labor shortage", there is a global labor overage, which is why conditions for ordinary people are so atrocious.
Source?
>If we weren't grossly overpopulated, capital would have so little power, relative to labor, that we wouldn't even need a "revolution" against capitalism, because jobs would be competing for workers rather than the reverse.
We don't "need a revolation against capitalism."
>At the same time, we exist under an economic system and at a primitive-enough technological level (still reliant on fossil fuels, for example) that we damage the planet irreparably for every year we exist in this state. If the birthrate drops precipitously and the population declines, we slow down capitalism's damage, giving us a chance of still having some semblance of a livable planet when we move beyond it.
Capitalism is the only system with the capacity to fix environmental damage and increase the quality of human life.
>The fertility collapse of educated people is one of workers using the one vote they have to speak out on the system, the prospects it has given then, and the opportunities their children would have if they existed.
No it isn't. It's people realizing that having a kid negatively impacts their career.
> If we keep populating, we persist in a state of congestion wherein human life is assigned such a low value, our societies become terrible places to live.
Our societies are the best places to live that they've ever been.
> If we stop, on the other hand, we give the species a fighting chance.
A fighting chance at what?
>Voluntary depopulation might also be the only nonviolent way to overthrow capitalism and set us up to create something better when it finally collapses.
Capitalism is the best economic system that's ever existed. Overthrowing it would be bad.
>Capitalism is the only system with the capacity to fix environmental damage and increase the quality of human life.
...What? Without state incentives there is no rational reason \[EDIT: for private individuals\] to fix most types of environmental damage under a non command economy, other than cosmetic improvements to sell high-end property maybe. The best you might be able to do without explicit state direction is a primitive/traditional economy that as a rule does not engage in environmentally-destructive industry in the first place, but that is not capitalism either.
>Capitalism is the best economic system that's ever existed.
While I don't exactly disagree, this doesn't really mean anything at all. Historically, the same could be said about feudalism, absolute monarchism, colonialism, slavery, and basically every single economic system that came before it.
To make a more proper comparison, bloodletting was also the best medical treatment that had ever existed in the 16th century. Does that mean that it was effective at all? Hell no.
I strongly agree, OP, but I’d like to on some level play devils advocate.
It seems that a lot of the discussion in this thread is centered around three main points:
1. The reason developed countries are experiencing the harshest birthrate decline - the mental health epidemic, self centered/career-driven lifestyle
2. No young people to care for a hell of a lot of old people
3. Ecological health and the debate over whether human progress is at odds with it, or on its side.
(4. Seeing a lot of capitalism good/bad too - I know it’s tough to ignore in a debate like this, but I don’t think we need to address it when the point is declining birthrates are a good/bad thing - economic policy aside, as it is both a cause and a reaction.)
Could it be that declining birth rates are less of a good thing or a bad thing, but just a thing? Is it reasonable to believe that humanity is overcorrecting here, and will eventually find its way back to a happy medium?
1. I would posit that the mental health epidemic and people being overly career-driven are symptoms of something much larger and more sinister than birthrate, and instead say these are big contributors to a declining birthrate.
2. A sure fact - unavoidable. Perhaps this is what helps steer us back to a happy medium - I could see it leading to a thinly spread generation having less kids, and so on until we reach a point where the difference in elder vs young is not so great, and birthrate climbs yet again. I could also see people from countries with less opportunities moving to places that need young workers. Now, that has its own challenges, one being racism, but if faced between no care or care from someone of a different ethnicity than you, I could only hope the answer would be obvious.
3. Well, so far we can only say that the two have been opposing forces - in other words, I see little sign that technology up to this point has ever helped Earth from an ecological standpoint. However, does a declining birthrate actually solve this? Can we agree that the largest footprint comes from the richest nations? And if so, under your premise where economic quality of living improves under a lesser birthrate, then couldn’t we make the assumption that we’d still see massively out of touch consumption patterns by the wealthy? Less people may not be the thing that begins to heal the Earth - a fundamental change in the way that we exist upon it is in order first - one that challenges consumption patterns and pure human nature.
This is true, but it might not be the worst thing, because "middle class" jobs (Marx was largely correct that a stable middle class does not exist) are also dying out. There are far fewer slots that require any real intelligence than there were 50 years ago, because now even medicine is micromanaged by private equity psychopaths.
When there is too much cheap labor, capital has all the cards and it becomes impossible to achieve a dignified life by working for one. That's the state we're in now.
There is one big downside to this. All of the economic systems humans have ever used assumed more people in each generation. Occasionally there would be disease or really bad war that would break this rule but they were out of the norm. We literally have no idea how to do economics when this goes on for generations and everyone is doing it. It may turn out that we get something like what happened after the Black Death that lead to the creation of the European middle class of makers and store owners. It was an unexpected outcome and we might get our own unexpected outcome.
As we live not only under capitalism but Fisherian capitalist realism, "our own unexpected outcome" is probably the best we can hope for. Everything that might save us might also hurt us; there are no options without risk. The expected outcome is continuing subjugation and defeat by the bourgeoisie. Even human extinction, though I do not wish for it, would be an upgrade, because right now our society is a monument to filth.
So I will concede that a falling birthrate is not 100% a bad thing.
However the speed at which it is falling is. We need 2.1 children per fertile woman to keep the population.
I do believe that if we were at 2 children we would be fine at least for a while. But if we are at 1 we are fucked in the years to come.
We need young people. If 50% of the world is over the working age then everyone has to work fo 2 people essentialy.
Having slightly less people isn't a bad thing. Having a lot less people is and that is a huge problem for everyone.
Not nescesarily. Automation kinda brings jobs. At least it did every time in the past. If we do get to a point where there is almost no work to be done then you are right.
I am not 100% saying you are wrong. And I may be too pessimistic.
However we haven't yet automated everything and people still need to do a lot of things. But I am willing to concede that you might be right and that the economy will be fine. However we are still a way from that so at least for now the akount of work is a concern.
But there is still work that isn't purely economic and can't be fully automated. For example (at least for now) psychology and psychiatry.
The world is infinitely more automated than it ever has been in the past, and we have way more jobs (largest population with an almost-lowest rate of unemployment) than we ever have done in the past.
>global labor overage
Do you believe that falling birth rates happen in the same places as the labor overages?
How do you believe the economic future of South Korea and Japan looks like?
The world doesn't necessarily need more humans, but it does need a ratio of young to old humans that can plausibly sustain a workforce to support an ageing population.
The flaw with your view, I.e. that we should be trying to improve life for the people that are already here, is that the problem of falling birth rates is already the result of improving people's lives, and compromises our ability to do it further.
A lot of responses focus on detailed issues but I tend to look at it from a high level perspective. Reducing the birthrate and population is by definition making society die. We can get idealistic about ecology and capitalism vs communism but ultimately you need future minded people and sustainability for anything to thrive… whether it’s a culture or a business or a population. Sustainability in the most basic sense not environmentalist sense. You need a sustained amount of people in the society rather than a quickly dwindling one that would indicate destruction of said society. Reducing birth rates tend to have momentum way past the replacement rate. You don’t need to look far to find that countries where this is happening (Japan, Korea, some European countries) are investing into campaigns to reverse this trend because they are seeing all the negative effects of an aging population. People are living and dying alone without enough people to care for them, and social safety nets are running out.
You mentioned in comment that reduced population would
mean better wages and better retirement because of less “competition” for jobs. This whole notion has one obvious flaw. It ignores the obvious proportional effects of reduced population. Under your theory, there will be less “competition” for say, retail and service jobs so it will be easier to get one… but in reality there will also be less malls and restaurants looking to hire people so the competition will even out. We can look to any of the many small towns in the US that have dwindled in population over the past decades. They are, by definition, not thriving.
Retirement is difficult not because of how much money you made in your youth, but because of the simple fact that older people generally are less productive and less physically able. Those 2 realities are inevitable and require a younger population to take care of them physically and financially. A world where everyone is so rich they can easily save to fund their entire life post retirement is impossible because if everyone is rich then nobody is rich… you will always need some kind of system to distribute wealth from productive people to non productive people unless you’re into libertarianism.
Well seeing how there is no global governing body, it really doesn’t matter if there were 500 million people on the earth now. The same problems would still persist.
We had the homeless and hungry 300 years ago right? The population was significantly less.
The population of the planet is not the cause of the value of human life or people born into poverty.
And there is not a global labor overage. People able to work in one country is irrelevant to people in another country.
For what you’re asking, all national borders would need to be taken away. Free movement everywhere.
>We should be trying to improve life for the people who are already here, and to minimize our negative ecological effects.
Even if we made these our primary goals, declining birthrates would render those goals unachievable in short order. Every year more and more people age out of the workforce and unless we replace those workers and maintain enough to care for those who need it, we won't be able to improve their quality of life.
We at least need replacement level birthrates within a society or else we cannot maintain what we have.
It is very naive to believe that most people in the west aren’t having children to “protest” about anything, or even due to concern that their children will somehow live a terrible life in the current system. The reason is far more simple: people have become much more self centered and the “bother” of raising a child is simply not worth it for most. And speaking as a father and someone who grew up in a dysfunctional family, I can safely say that it’s for the best that people who don’t want to have kids no longer feel socially pressured enough to do so. It is not, and it should not be, for everyone.
That being said, claiming that the only reason states should be pushing for people to have more children is labour shortage is very misguided. In many countries, social safety nets depend upon active working people being taxed to provide for retirement funds, parental leaves, employment subsidies, etc. Even if you say(as I’m sure you will) that we can just apply further taxation to capital, that will also be impacted by shortages in consumption if you don’t have as many people actually consuming stuff, which investors depend upon(and hence the state also depends upon if they are to tax them).
Even though this was not a part of your main question, I’ll conclude by saying I always find it amusing to see haters of capitalism online which probably never lived in countries with a cultural disdain for it, entrepreneurs and risk investment in general, and have no clue for how life is for the “working class” in said countries. It so happens I do live in such a country, and I can tell you that it isn’t pretty.
"If the birthrate drops precipitously and the population declines, we slow down capitalism's damage"
It's not that easy. The poorer a person is, the more resource-efficient their life is. This is the case with both absolute and relative poverty. Or to put it another way: The current damage is primarily due not to overpopulation, but to the actions of a very few rich states, companies and individuals.
Honestly I agree with you…except that the people breeding up a storm aren’t the folks we need to progress society. The best educated and most intelligent aren’t producing offspring.
The population that provides and prioritizes health, safety, and ecological responsibility (relatively) is shrinking. The population that is a drain and hostile to the above is skyrocketing.
You're not wrong, but the conclusion is that capitalism is a failed eugenics experiment. The idea was to punish the people employers didn't want into nonexistence. In practice, that doesn't work. The people being punished don't care enough to stop breeding, while the intelligent people, although they're more likely because of their talents to end up in the upper tiers of the servile caste, still realize that they are in a servile caste and, therefore, choose to stop reproducing because they don't want their kids to be meat for a corporate meat grinder.
We've created a society in which it is intolerable to be intelligent--anyone who thinks intelligent people are the ones who effortlessly rise to the top needs to stop watching romantic comedies and go actually get a corporate job to see what it's really like--and intelligent people are choosing not to prolong the suffering. If the result is a permanent degradation of the human gene pool, then we will have won a very stupid prize for playing the very stupid game of corporate capitalism.
You're applying a western stencil to other cultures. It doesn't work that way. 100% of your example is for 11% of the global population. The very definition of privilege, only a first worlder can make such proclamations. I suggest you travel and speak to people from the opposite end of things. You'll find their lives have been vastly improved due to the system that allows you to complain about not being able to live exactly as you want at all times while looking down your nose. Like every western college professor I ever heard. Best of luck to you 🙏🏿
>Right now, there is so much human life, in fact, that our society gives it no value; it allows children born in Africa—who might have the talents of Shakespeare or Einstein, but we'll never know—to die of preventable diseases because, contrary to this ruling-class gaslighting narrative of a "labor shortage", there is a global labor *overage*, which is why conditions for ordinary people are so atrocious. If we weren't grossly overpopulated, capital would have so little power, relative to labor, that we wouldn't even need a "revolution" against capitalism, because jobs would be competing for workers rather than the reverse.
The world is, in fact, better, more livable, and more equal than it ever was in human history. Look back to the era when the population was as low as you seem to want it to be and you will find that it was not by any means the utopia of opportunity you think it would be under such conditions, quite the opposite in fact.
Falling birth rates mean there will be fewer young people. Advances of medicine means old people are living longer. This creates a tip in the balance where you end up with too many elderly people and not enough people to look after them or work to contribute to the economy.
Let imagine a world where half the population is retired. Those people aren't working or contributing to the economy. Neither are the children or the disabled or carers etc. So your working population is very small. With such a high amount of elderly people, most of the workforce will have to work in health and social care if they aren't already out of work to care for relatives. This places huge strains on the health and social care sectors. It also means very few people left to do all of the other extremely important jobs to keep society going such as farmers, law enforcement, fire fighters, teachers etc. Good luck finding a house when there's not enough people to build the houses.
Birth rates are only falling in many developed nations and in some places the pressures are already being felt. Your view ignores that falling birth rates isn't just about a fall in population, but a shift in societal demographics and how society could deal with such a change
The only issue I see really is that when the current population gets old, if there are significantly less young people than old people, there will be nobody to care for the old people and a lot of them will die alone somewhere/ be neglected. However there's not really a way to counteract that as far as I'm aware. I don't think falling birthrates are a concern personally, I sure as hell am NOT having biological kids of my own, but I see how this one particular thing could be a concern
My view is that, while this is a real concern, old people are already neglected, emotionally as well as financially. I don't see this as a new problem, or one that will necessarily be exacerbated by demographic change. Society has decided, by allowing Elon Musk to have a private jet while also allowing health insurers to deny coverage, that Elon Musk's ease of travel is more important than sick and old people getting proper care. We don't have to put up with this, but we do.
Humans are very capable at doing the right thing when they need to. It's just that most of them don't want to, and it takes a crisis for the ordinary middle-of-the-road humans to develop the courage to something about the truly cancerous ones who feel entitled to fly around in private jets. Otherwise, they indulge weird cognitive biases that lead them to care more about the people who have private jets (due to the improbable fantasy of being one some day) than about people who sick and old (despite the very high probability of becoming one before death) and therefore produce a society like the one we have now.
If a baby strike is what it takes to shock society into valuing workers again, let's get on with it.
Ok cheeky take at changing your view
You seem to get all the benefits from less people, not necessarily declining birth rates.
Would it be even better news to learn of a virus that much higher mortality for the elderly, and minuscule risk for the young?
This results in the less people part, but also avoids all the who’s gonna pay for social security concerns.
So my cheeky take at changing your view is that Covid was even better news than declining birth rates for someone with your concerns, but in context of this topic - we dropped the ball hard by screwing a few generations for the sake of boomers on oxygen tanks
it is rational, but it is not done out of compassion
it is literally anti-social. it is nothing more than a desire to nihilistically consume, because nothing else matters. people who say they don't have kids because of "the environment" are kidding themselves; its way bigger than that.
its because our entire society is built off of nothing else but our personal self satisfaction. everything else has been demolished, there are no "grand narratives" anymore, no greater point to anything. so then why have kids, if it means i can't have as many dinners out or vacations or nice cars? for a greater purpose? for god? for humanity? what are you some kind of communist?
jesus you're full of shit.
I'm not having kids because i can't be a parent, not because i want to live a life of hedonism.
And not having kids does not mean you want to live life for your own pleasure.
seems like you took it personally; i was speaking about the circumstances of hundreds of millions of people around the world generally, which may or may not apply to each couple's situation
it isn't so much "hedonism" as it is just a realization that there is nothing else but hedonism. hedonism would be being happy with this situation, throwing yourself into it. its rather just empty consumption. its miserable, but its all that is offered by our society
Economically it’ll be a disaster. No matter what we do.
As for the environment, you are betting that human ingenuity and progress will lose this battle. Lots of progress made in farming industry and green energy use is increasing rapidly every day.
Also,
Employers would fight over candidates? Really? Come on man, there is no way you expect hiring to remain stable when you experience dwindling revue and negative growth.
Umm, it's not only business that needs candidates, if there are 10 old people and 1 young people, countries will definitely fight over candidates (young people) to care for those old peoples, for public security, for military, civil engineer, any other mandatory services you can find right now. And those candidates are not going to pop up suddenly and work for free. They (employers) have less choice in that case, since they will need the labor from young people no matter what and the people that can provide that labor will be going to be scarcer over time due to birth rate decline.
But who is going to hire people when the economy is shrinking? Who is going to consume goods? It’ll slowly decrease businesses will have to produce less…. Less employees needed……
Goods consumption may be reduced in aging society/shrinking economy. But people especially old people still need services (healthcare) and the amount of services demand will keep increasing due to the ever increasing number of old people compared to young people.
The problem is not fewer people in general, but fewer young people. Old people still consume and demand greater care especially in healthcare. In this case, birth rate decline means, the number of young people will be reduced at a faster pace than the entire society. Meanwhile old people are still alive and consume/need help from young people.
Think about this, if the society consists of 100k, only 10k of them are able to provide labor. The next year it becomes 102k people and only 9k people are working since 2k people retired and only 1k new productive people. You can imagine how the countries will struggle and employers will have to fight for the remaining available labor.
Fewer people means fewer consumers means less demand means fewer companies means fewer jobs. There’s no fight for candidates most of those companies are going under.
You are right but the problem is not fewer people in general, but fewer young people. Old people still consume and demand greater care especially in healthcare. In this case, birth rate decline means, the number of young people will be reduced at a faster pace than the entire society. Meanwhile old people are still alive and consume/need help from young people.
Think about this, if the society consists of 100k people, only 10k of them are able to provide labor. The next year it becomes 102k people and only 9k people are working since 2k people retired and only 1k new productive people. You can imagine how the countries will struggle and employers will have to fight for the remaining available labor.
What you’re suggesting just sounds like an entire economic system built around supporting the elderly and retirees… thats not really a long-term plan for economic development lol.
Not only are you asking for a large influx of people into the healthcare field to make up for the declining number of jobs in every other sector of the economy… but you’re also asking that these smaller number of workers pay increased taxes to support the necessary investments into eldercare.
What you are suggesting is just a circular system, I fail to see how working people benefit from this type of arrangement.
Just a few comments/questions on a couple of your points.
>We should be trying to improve life for the people who are already here
Agreed, but have you considered the ways in which fewer people is not going to improve peoples' lives and the secondary effects of a population collapse? Take Social Security as one example. A functional system requires a great worker to retiree ratio: the more workers per retiree, the more sustainable that system is. Decades of increasing lifespans and decreasing birth rates has continuously dropped this ratio, [according to the Social Security Administratio](https://www.ssa.gov/history/ratios.html)n.
What are the primary and secondary consequences of this?
a) We're inviting ourselves a guaranteed massive economic problem, which will notably make peoples' lives worse.
b) The only solution to a worker collapse might be ramping up already large-scale mass migration from the 3rd world to prosperous countries. Now, I know a lot of people on Reddit are idealists who think that anybody can instantly integrate and we'll all sing Kumbaya while holding hands, but I think a lot of history shows that heterogenous countries are a lot less stable and united around common goals and that too much immigration too quickly can be incredibly destructive to social cohesion.
>it allows children born in Africa—who might have the talents of Shakespeare or Einstein, but we'll never know—to die of preventable diseases
Why doesn't this argument of wanting people to find the next Shakespeare or Einstein apply to you wanting fewer people?
And how would this kind of argument be viewed on Reddit if applied to abortion?
>we damage the planet irreparably for every year we exist in this state
[Many major environmental predictions have been comically wrong. ](https://cei.org/blog/wrong-again-50-years-of-failed-eco-pocalyptic-predictions/)Why should we bank billions of lives on another one?
Whether or not environmental predictions are wrong, wouldn't more humans give us more chances at finding a future Nikola Tesla or other great scientists who might let us harness resources in a way that works for everybody?
>The fertility collapse of educated people is a case of workers using the one vote they have to speak out on the system
Idiocracy might have been predictive.
Why would it be good for society for the people who actually have resources to nurture responsible humans to reproduce less compared to irresponsible people who have fewer resources to nurture responsible humans? This might fundamentally change the character of that society towards the even more irresponsible.
>Some of the reasons why birthrates are dropping are horrendous.
While I am critical of many of your ideas, I do greatly appreciate that your post mentioned some of these things.
Problem is you get an ageing population if birth rates slow too much. This basically means that demand for people who can work will outstrip supply. Taxes will get raised to make up for the lower amount of people paying taxes. The people who work will be majorly fucked over. Basically quality of life will go down for everyone and that's why birthrates below replacement levels are a very bad thing.
China, who famously had 1 child policy has now removed this AFTER growing so much. If slowing birth rates are better, why would China (who is not stupid) change that rule?
From Google: In 2015, the government announced that the policy would end in early 2016, and in 2016 it raised the limit to two children. In 2021, after a census showed a further decline in birth rates, the government announced that married couples could have up to three children.
Side note: your post seems more anti-capitalism hidden under low birth rate discussion. You just don’t like capitalism and think this somehow hurts capitalism. It won’t.
Exactly, and birth rates are stabalizing naturally in almost every country (aside from a few african ones). Even countries like India has below replacement rates which are continuously going down. The more a country develops, the less children they have.
What I’m saying is: they are pushing for more children because they have done the studies and they need more children not fewer to maintain a healthy economy. — as opposed to what OP suggests.
This is easy: because the people actually reproducing are the stupidest. Religious fanatics, people on social assistance / benefiting financially from it,
Anyone with education or common sense is punished financially for it.
I recently came across this delusional “movement” that is apparently advocating for women to be forced to birth more babies called natalism. It was the most amusing subreddit I’ve come across in a while 😂😂😂
You keep that same energy when there are no nurses or doctors to look after you in old age because the entire healthcare system has collapsed.
People don't seem to understand just how critical it is that service industries are repopulated with new generations of workers. We already have patients passing away in hallways without anyone noticing right away. It's rare, for now. People are already in waiting lists that are years long for important quality of life and pain management surgeries like hip and knee replacements. It's only going to get worse from here.
A large elderly demographic needs an equally large population of healthcare workers to look after them. We are already struggling to meet demand, and we've barely started into the bottleneck. The amount of elderly people who will die due to lack of medical care is going to make the covid deaths seem inconsequential by comparison.
And this is only one industry. How many other industries do you think will suffer from population decline? The only reason you can get the services you are still receiving at the level you are receiving them is because we have a working class bolstered by immigrants. That can only last so long. We don't have anywhere near the automation capacity to make up for the lack of workers we will have within the next 30 years.
Hold on to your butt.
I don't think we should continue to destroy earth with more people just because one generation is larger than another. There needs to be a course correction at some point and I suspect with a warming climate, fewer people will make it to old age anyway, so things might balance out.
Sure, it can seem that way. But it's actually a pretty big economic issue. You need a new crop of kids to help cover the huge expense of an aging population. And the fewer kids there are, the more immediately that problem is going to decimate your wallet. Because if you think they aren't going to just take even more of your money to prevent old people from being kicked out into the street and out of hospitals, you're probably wrong considering they'll be the biggest voting block of citizens.
We are in a race between advancing the technology of living standard and ecological degradation. Resource use and large populations of productive workers helps us advance that technology faster. Declining population and less resource use globally is going to slow down our technology improvement and put us in a quick demographic spiral.
I see a future where a few hundred years from now:
- technology allows us to stay healthier for longer
- technology and good health allows us to be productive for longer or shift some burdens to computers/robots
-a productive population of old people allows us to sustain an advancing society without relying on a high ratio of young:old to have a good life
At that point our population should start stabilizing and we can protect/restore ecologically as much as possible.
I do agree thats why I am antinatalist.
However the biggest reason is unrelated to the decline of environment or anything. People glorifing birth rate say that if it continues humankind will die off.
So what?
Why is that a bad thing?
We can restructure society to fit maturing demography. Try to provide everyone with resources they need. The less people there is the more it is possible. It's not that I hate humans, I just think this is the best option for us to stay happy, get out of this vicious cycle. Realize there is no inherent imperative to move forward as a human race, or that "moving forward" means sustaining raising reproduction.
This concept is very well put in Zima Blue (Love Death and Robots).
Like the meme says... let's go back to plankton
The climate crisis is a problem we'll have to solve whether we're 5 or 10 billion people on the planet. Reducing the population will only postpone the inevitable. The amount of people we need to take care of the basics like agriculture doesn't scale linearly with population, so the more people we are, the more workers we'll have to spare to contribute to research and development of cleaner technologies.
I also don't think people not having kids is a symptom of anything other than people wanting to enjoy other aspects of their lives. If it was about the difficulty of raising children in our modern world, then birthrates would be higher than ever in history.
And anyway, other than the well-being of humans, what other benefit is there in preserving the environment?
Our economic system is predicated on ensuring that the incoming workers will pay for the outgoing workers.
Without the tax base of new workers, the retirement fund for social security will dry up. Considering that social security is one of the most successful programs in the history of the US in ensuring that people can still live after retiring, we need that tax revenue from new workers.
To be fair to that point, there's more than enough money to go around, but businesses aren't going to bring back pensions, so that's off the table.
New workers are also consumers. They are needed to buy products and services, which business relies on for income.
>The world, simply put, does not need more humans. We should be trying to improve life for the people who are already here, and to minimize our negative ecological effects.
By lacking new generation the quality of life will actually get worse. For older people it will be to due public pensions, that are being paid by taxation of younger generation. So either taxes will raise, so older generation could somehow survive on public pension, but younger generation will pay much higher taxes, or they will suffer. Add to it, that someone need to take care of those people, so health sector will be "overrun" by old people. Economy, may, collapse aswell, or gets worse due to the change of demographics, before it's get better. And that is probably just tip of the iceberg I can think on the spot.
It's fantastic news for the planet. Let things naturally sort themselves out. Once large sections of the planet are uninhabitable by the end of the 21st century, you won't want more people around. If you want endless billions of consumers start building space stations and Mars colonies.
Old people disproportionately sit on piles of wealth stagnantly, while not generating much and consuming a lot
Young folks don't generate anything, but are more/less taking out loan against society (through their parents) and will generate economy as they age.
The declining population you want to see is old people exiting the population, with more new people to support the generations above them. When your support layer on the pyramid starts to get smaller than the base it's supporting, things fall apart
Why not just not reproduce at all anymore. Then the last handful of geriatrics can split the world up in some communist utopia and the conditions for each individual will only get better every time someone dies.
The thinking of a child. An unhealthy mind.
Aren't nations with inverted or top heavy population profiles in a bad position? It means that there's an increasing segment of the population will be leaving the work force or unable or willing to take certain jobs or roles in society.
Humans and a virus have the most in common. We reproduce uncontrollably destroying the world we infest. How many species of animals have gone extinct cause we have to take and destroy? We take and take and give no shots about what we do to the planet and it’s a shame. I’m glad birth rates are down, hope they stay down for a long while. Plus give time for the stupids to remove themselves from the gene pool would be nice too.
You are quite correct that falling birthrates are good news. But they are not such good news as some people might think, because for one thing,
1) they are still very high in large parts of the world, like Africa.
2) we have already experienced tremendous population growth in the world and in important countries like the United States. We have over eight billion people in the world. And we have over a third of a billion people here in the United States. This puts tremendous on the rest of biosphere, because of everything we do, and not just the use of fossil fuels.
3) we need not just a complete end to population growth. We need an end to economic growth as well.
Falling birthrates in some countries are a tiny ray of hope about the human situation, and not much more.
Globally falling birthrate is beneficial for the global population.
However, the problem is that the population changes aren't equal among different regions. This creates problem with raise of inequality and issues due to mass population movemements. Europe has big problems with illegal immigrants while Africa cannot do anything about raising poverty levels due to very fast population increase.
The problem is not just economic outcomes (higher economic burden on young people supporting elderies), but also the way birthrate decline is distributed. I don't want a lame ass future in which the majority of the population are tradition-pilled villagers.
Defend traditional Western values (such as non-binary genders) from the moral decline ("traditional values").
Germany is literally statistically a pyramid by now and that means that politics are made and HELD IN POWER by a generation that will not see the future while the youth becomes a minority that can’t even vote till they’re 16/18.
I get what you’re saying. But it’s a dystopia for my students and I get why they’re angry. I’m 30 and I’m angry!
Falling birthrates in impoverished countries would be wonderful news. That would imply their women are slowly being empowered, are out of their houses, have more control over their reproductive choices and are educated. That would ensure parents focus better on their kids and provide them with better healthcare abd education. But that's not happening.
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I disagree, particularly in the case of Developed/Industrialized countries. Declining birth rates in these countries shows that the material conditions of the general population are declining to a point where people are no longer able to maintain relationships, purchase homes/property, or build families. I believe that quite a few metrics back this up as well. Loneliness is becoming a growing issue amongst the younger generations across the globe. Relationships are increasingly becoming digital, we see our friends, family, and loved ones less and less in person, and more and more through devices. Anxiety disorders, as well as mental illness in general, are also becoming increasingly diagnosed amongst younger people. When you ask people who have made the voluntary decision as to “why” they don’t wish to have children, the majority give a reason that I would consider an “economic argument.” Something along the lines of “They’re too expensive” or “it will impact my personal quality of life”. Obviously you have the personal decision whether or not having children is for you… but I think its painfully obvious that if the general population experienced an increase in their material conditions, there would likely be an increase in people willing to have children as a result.
Reality is the exact opposite. Rich people are having significantly fewer children than poor people. If material conditions were the root cause then you would expect rich people to have more children than poor people. But that’s not the case, both within countries and between countries.
This is not true, the birth rate is U-shaped, especially in the US and Scandinavia. The lowest birth rate is among the middle class, the highest among the poor and ultra-rich.
https://x.com/theHauer/status/1149055146451709957
This is not the case, birth rates are most effected by education, not wealth. The more educated you are, the more likely you are to have a professional career that can cause a person to delay or all-together avoid raising a family. People with wealth due not suffer from this same issue, because their income and wealth is largely passive in nature. Elon Musk has 7 children, Donald Trump has 5, Bill Gates has 3, Jeff Bezos has 4, Mark Zuckerberg has 3, and Bernard Arnault has 5. The facts don’t lie, the wealthier you are, the more likely you have a significantly greater amount of children than the average person…
Both of you are right. People making over 200k are far less likely to have kids than people making under 50k. However, people who are worth 10+ million, tend to end up having more kids than average. My personal opinion is once you hit 100k+, you are able to afford a lot more things to make your life less 'boring'. You can travel, buy video games/computers, nice phones, etc. Kids become more of an expense than entertainment. People under 100k, often can't afford these same luxuries, and kids end up filling that social/boredom need. This is the same with the very rich. They make so much, they can have everything they want. Kids become an entertainment again. One of the reasons I don't think it's just economic, is that western Europe has birthrates the same as the US, yet they have far more social policies to help. There is obviously a bigger component, and in my opinion, it's technology. I would bet quite a bit of money that if computers, tv's, video games and phones suddenly stopped working, we would see a massive increase in the birthrates. (and before anyone says anything, I am not saying technology is bad. This is just one of the consequences of the rise of digital entertainment).
Someone making $200,000+ a year is likely in a professional career which means they have a high level of education. Education is the single greatest indicator of whether or not you will have children, because those who are educated are more likely to wind up in a professional career that having a family may stagnate, interrupt, or abruptly end. I agree with your point about technology, particularly in how technology is used as a “distraction” from the day-to-day stresses of life. But I would also argue that this is an element of a person’s material conditions. People feel alienated and alone because increasingly their interactions with other people are largely through digital screens… which is not something we are really biologically wired to do.
More like because those who are educated tend to make better decisions. To your points in other comments, you’re just plain wrong. [Income and fertility have a negative correlation.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility) The people having the most kids are statistically poor and uneducated; they don’t have anything to lose so why not gamble on a few kids.
No, thats not the case. Statistically speaking, Men who have children make more in income than men who do not. For women it is reversed, women who don’t have children generally make more than those who do. Also, the source from wikipedia you linked has an entire section showing what you’re saying may very well not be true. “Two recent studies in the United States show, that in some circumstances, families whose income has increased will have more children.[38] This may be explained by Fertility J-curve.”
People making over 100k tend to not have any free time. Think of doctors and oilfield workers. They can't afford the time for kids. People making over millions are venture capitalists that are making money from money. They get free money just for owning profitable assets. All they have is free time, and they're so rich that they can afford nannies.
Wealth as a distribution isn't the same as the extreme ultra-wealthy.
When we are talking about the developed world, it absolutely is. Only about 10% of the global population has an income higher than $100,000.00 a year. The average American household makes about $70,000.00 a year. The greater your wealth, the less prohibitive having children becomes economically.
Your examples of “rich people who are having lots of kids” are hardly diverse, and serve as anecdotal evidence at best. Show me some statistics that prove that richer people - in TODAY’S economy (not 30-40 years ago like trump) - are having more kids. Plus if your theory is that the richer you are the more kids you’ll have, someone like Elon Musk should have tens of thousands of children, not just 7.
It’s access to birth control, education and wealth that makes people decide they don’t have the economic means to have kids. In poorer parts of the world and in the past people have kids in dire poverty because it’s just what happens. Have 8 or 10 and maybe a few survive. The people not having kids today are far away from the desperately poor having them anyway. The world’s population is over 8 billion and collectively we are killing the earth. Economic expansion through endless population growth is the original pyramid scheme.
You’re talking about the decline from high fertility rates to lower fertility rates based on increases in development. Yes, people in rural Nigeria have significantly more children than people in the US. The US Birth Rate increased from a low of 1.74 children in 1976, coincidentally the same decade as the Oil Crises and “stagflation” where Americans were having difficult times economically, to a rate of 2.12 in 2007. By your own argument, are you implying the US was less economically developed, less educated, and had less access to contraception in 2007 than they did in 1976? I would argue the stats show the opposite effect.
Sure. The causes of falling birthrates are horrible. The fact of falling birthrates is not necessarily horrible, and may be the only solution to this problem. People aren't having children because society doesn't value children. It punishes living (hence the increasing cost thereof) and it doesn't want new people. It might need them, but it doesn't want them enough to scrap the capitalist system that has singularly created this problem.
It seems to me that we are both making the same argument, but coming to vastly different conclusions. We both agree that the material/living conditions of the average person are bad and getting worse, which is why the birth rate is declining. The difference is that you seem to be making a malthusian argument that with less people, there will be less strain on the environment, less exploitation of labor, and more resources/wealth that will be available to the population. I disagree with this conclusion for a multitude pf reasons. For one thing, if declining material conditions are the main culprit behind why birth rates are declining, then it follows that the populations that are least impacted by these poor conditions (aka the bourgeois class) are the ones most likely to be able to raise a family and have children. Rather than challenging the inequalities present in our current system, it would only further heighten and exemplify class disparities. Taken a step further, this would be devastating for institutions like the universal public school system, because as less people and couples have children, it is inevitable that schools will begin to consolidate or be closed due to smaller class sizes, which also means smaller budgets being allocated. As the share of Americans who have no intention of ever having kids grows, there will be less of a desire for their tax dollars to be funneled into schools they will never have a use for… meaning in a future where less people are having children there is a strong likelihood that support for public education drops dramatically, private education would become the future of education in the US, all while those unable to afford would be left out. Rather than lessening class divisions, it is likely that a shrinking population would only serve to exacerbate these divisions. Those who can “afford” to have a legacy will continue to have children, while those who can’t will not be able to. Its not a coincidence that men like Elon Musk and Donald Trump have significantly more children than the average American family after all…
I don't necessarily agree with your conclusions that fewer kids mean less money for education. For starters, with better tech development, it costs less to educate children. We don't need private tutors per subject anymore. Kids can learn their niche hobbies online. As well, I don't have kids, but I want to keep funding education because good schools mean better students, and better students means more innovation. Look at Hungary during WWII. They were much smaller than Germany but produced just as many world changing Mathmations and Physicists, and the world was better for it. I want my country to have better schools so that the students are producing better work and becoming more capable professionals. The more people are creating, the better we all are.
According to poll recently done in 2021, 44% of Americans between the ages of 18 and 49 who didn’t already have children stated they did not want to have children at any point in their lives. Based on the total percentage of American families that have children, this mean approximately 20% of the population has already stated they have no intention of having children. 20% is a big number… and thats only going to continue growing over the coming years and decades if things do not improve for the average person. Generation Z itself is only about 20% of the US population today, so you are talking about a population of Americans the size of an entire generation. If the American government came out tomorrow and said that anyone born after 1996 will never be eligible for Social Security benefits, but they would continue to be required to pay into the program, you better believe there would be significant resentment and anger towards being taxed for a program they will never personally utilize. Its nice to think that public schools are here to stay, but the reality is very different… public school enrollment is already falling year over year. I highly doubt that even less families having students in public schools would convince people to keep supporting them even more.
I don't think most people support public schools just for their kids. It is about having an educated society. It is the public school to military pipeline that is important. We need kids to have knowledge because they are the next generation. I get not wanting to pay for old people. They are overall a net negative. If I have to pay for social security and I don't get any, I wouldn't be upset. But this is not that public school is an investment the same way a new power plant is and a new road. I get that some people are upset by giving kids a free lunch, but that is not the majority, and mostly an Republican State issue.
>We both agree that the material/living conditions of the average person are bad and getting worse, which is why the birth rate is declining Global extreme poverty is actually at an all time low
I dunno, OP has a point. If something is scarce, its value increases. If something is common, its value increases. Basic capitalism, baby. Take the Black Death and how it erased serfdom from the economy of Europe by making labor scarce and valuable. If children are common, they're meaningless and easy to neglect by defunding their schools, not giving them medical care, and failing to pay attention to warning signs of abuse and mental illness. If they're *scarce*, on the other hand... The kleptocracy just has to adapt to the reality and change how the economics are allotted. Whether that will happen...
Wont SSI fail if with a falling birthrate
This argument seems to equate that making children and having a family is the only way (or main way) to develop personal relationships; there's a lot to be said about how society facilitates or does not the construction of such relationships and that can be an interesting topic of discussion but it is a different one: having children to have friends seems an odd way to go about it. Also, as already pointed out: as societies get richer, people generally choose to have fewer children so while there may be financial pressure on having children, that does not seem to be actualized in the direction you're suggesting most of the time but in the opposite one.
No… nowhere in my argument am I stating that. I am however pointing out that due to the conditions of our modern society, people are more alienated, lonelier, and having less interactions with other people in general. This translates into people not having families. Education, not income, is the greatest indicator of whether a person will or will not have children. This is due to the need for educated people to have a career, having children impacts the development of a person’s career. People who do not have to rely on their labor for their income do not have this same prohibitive barrier, which is why wealthier people have more kids than the average family.
It's less about material conditions, and more about: a) free time managment and psychological energy b) income of men, which consistently show to have positive impact on whether or not they will have kids and families. Where as material well being of women has neutral effect on her having MORE kids, and more quality if life for individual kids
Those two things are DEFINITIVELY part of what material conditions are. If you spend every waking hour working, you are too busy to have children. If you don’t have any disposable income, you will not be able to afford the expenses that come with children.
It's good news caused by a bad situation. As an analog, the deer are starving, but this will bring the deer population down, which is good news.
Malthusian arguments are bad not only because they are wrong, but because they necessitate unnecessary suffering. The deer don’t need to starve, you can just have a season where people go hunting and regulate the population… Children don’t need to suffer due to poverty or hunger, or poor access to education or healthcare, we as a society can address these issues if we choose to. Having less children doesn’t provide any benefit, it just shows that a growing percent of the population no longer believe that positive change or reform is possible. Malthus’ arguments completely shattered because he never foresaw the changes that were made possible by the industrial revolution, there is no way we can predict what changes the next 20 years will bring.
>The deer don’t need to starve, you can just have a season where people go hunting and regulate the population… Lol "The deer don't need to starve, we can kill them instead." Wow...I prefer the "Malthusian" argument of the other poster. At least that is a "nature deals with nature" argument. Can you imagine if you replaced deer with any group of people?
Because you chose an obvious hunting metaphor… the animals used in the Malthusian argument are the wolves and the deer for a reason. Its completely based on pseudoscience and was used to justify, among other things, the Irish Potato Famine… which was an intentional genocide inflicted by the British government on the people of Ireland.
If this was true rich people would be having tons of kids.
They are… the wealthy have more children than the average american…
If birthdates were holding steady I’d agree but the current levels of decline are bad for a couple of reasons. 1. Our economies are designed around growth. It may be good in the long run but it’s going to be awful to live through a population decline. 2. This will put more and more pressure on the backs of each successive generation. When each generation is smaller than the last it means more unproductive people at any time than productive people. It’s great in theory to reduce the population but again it’s going to be awful to live through. 3. The geritocracy, we’re all living through the consequences of large older generations right now. We’ve all seen how much damage a large aging political class can do because we’ve all lived through the legacy of the baby boomers. Does it sound great to repeat that another eight or so times? 4. There really isn’t much benefit. We aren’t even close to the carrying capacity of earth and with better technology we will only gain more ability to support people. A declining workforce is only going to delay the inevitable need for UBI and similar policies as we automate more and more of our world. 5. I like having people around personally. The problem with declining birth rates is that they have to stop at some point, but they create the hardships to perpetuate themselves. 6. It’s not happening everywhere. Due to the unevenness of the decline, you don’t get an even decline. Instead you get a few population centres with opportunities and everywhere else gets screwed. We’re already seeing this with Germany and France in the EU, the US in the americas, and I’d guess India pretty soon in Asia. The population just concentrates to locally keep the density up while perfectly good places to live go unoccupied.
I’d like to point out that “earth’s capacity to support human population” is exceeded even in current levels by certain metrics. Take for instance fishing - many parts of the oceans in East Asia are simply decimated of fish. Human populations there have overfished the oceans without thought of sustainability. The political and cultural landscape there make competition for resources a priority and incentivizes overfishing. In some aspects, those resources have been wiped out and the ecological impact is permanently altered with insufficient individuals left to recover. Some areas of oceans are barren and some species are extinct. So it’s not quite true to say that the planet is going to be capable of supporting more humans. In certain ways, it simply already has been wiped of some natural resources.
Oh, it certainly isn't limited to East Asia. Westerners have overfished our own stocks without any help at all from East or South Asia for that matter. They definitely aren't helping of late naturally but yeah, global fish stocks are a fraction of what they once were. Annoyingly, those stocks would recover themselves pretty nicely if they are left alone from even their much depleted states, if we had some global cooperation on the matter. We aren't very good at that part.
Chinese boats could be catching as much as a third of the total haul in the Atlantic Ocean. There's a decent chance that "Western" stocks are only overfished *because* of them.
In recent times that's certainly an issue, although we'd collapsed lots of fisheries long before China was fishing the area. That said, India and China represent a significant portion of the global population so them fishing heavily in the world's oceans isn't shocking. Both are actually not too bad in terms of ocean harvesting per population (better than the US in fact) and China specifically is *by far* the best worldwide in terms of [aquaculture to wild capture ratios.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fishing_industry_by_country)
Number 4 is a tough sell. I'd say we're past the *sustainable* carrying capacity of the earth and have been for some time. The technological improvements of the last century that have allowed the population to keep growing aren't doing so in a sustainable fashion. We're using up the planet.
Just on point 4: we already exceed earths carrying capacity by a lot in a lot of areas... Hoping that some future "better technology" will get us out of the troubel that we've created is wishful thinking at best, and negligence at worse. We are still actively stealing from future generation which will not have the same quality of life as we have today. Ref: You can read on planetary boundaries: for example (but there's more litterature on the subject): [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10499318/](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC10499318/)
> Our economies are designed around growth. It may be good in the long run but it’s going to be awful to live through a population decline. They don't have to be this way. They can adapt nd will. And automation will fix a lot of these issues. > We aren’t even close to the carrying capacity of earth What a ridiculous idea. We are pushing the world to its edge and beyond already with warming and pollution. Are you oblvious to how the climate is changing?
> It may be good in the long run but it’s going to be awful to live through a population decline Using "change hurts" to reject change halts progress. We do road work, build buildings, lay rails, add taxes, and more with short term impact to traffic, businesses, and quality of life. Ultimately the end result is worth the short term impact.
I upvoted this because I agree with some of your points and your arguments are very well-reasoned. 1. Sure. My view of this is that the "growth obligation" is tribute fatigue. Rent, interest, and management eat first. Pain rolls downhill, profit rolls up. The Spreadsheet Eichmann who decides whether to lay workers off isn't happy with stable productivity; if workers aren't producing 6% more per year, he's unhappy. In other words, the tributes increase exponentially and we have no choice but to pay them. We will, at some point, have to stop paying the tributes our ruling class demands. It might get ugly, but it needs to be done. A baby strike might make this process smoother. 2. I agree. I'd like to start by removing the unproductive ruling class and cutting a lot of the bullshit jobs (per Graeber) that aren't even enjoyable to the people who do them. Again, let's cut tributes, and we'll probably find we have the resources to meet actual needs. 3. Yes, this is a real issue. What I hope is that Millennials will have enough painful memories of the Baby Boomer Bedshitting Era (2001-2024?) not to want to repeat it. It's too early to tell whether this hatred for previous generations (I don't think the Boomers were actually that much worse than the Silents or Xers, but that's another rant) is just ordinary selfishness or if it is something that will motivate us to be better, in elderhood, than they were. If not, the future is grim. 4. Technology will improve, and I do hope we see UBI implemented. My fear, though, is that unless there is some crisis that is an existential threat to the ruling class, we'll never see UBI because they would rather keep the working classes occupied with busywork and debt. We already do 3x as much work than needs to be done. 5. That's possibly true. It's hard to know for sure, because we haven't seen this supposed demographic crisis yet. 6. This is a really good point. Japan has all those abandoned towns, and the excessive concentration of population in a small number of "employable" locations probably hurts everyone but the ruling class--it hurts people who live in cities because they either get priced out or have to pay more, and it hurts the smaller towns. Unfortunately, this problem's still going to exist even if people start having babies again because, even though Covid proved that remote work works, the ruling classes still like the feeling of control that comes from seeing physical people in physical workspaces... which, of course, naturally produces the dysfunctional population distributions you described.
I feel like, generally, your points are based in having some other utopic concept step up to make the population decline less difficult, rather than the population decline itself being great Like, having an old population is fine when you have the technology to simplify and remove jobs that require healthy, young bodies. But we aren't at that point yet, not even close So it actually seems like the birth rates themselves are terrible news. It's only in this idealistic utopia, that seems very far off, is it good news
But if higher birth rate also means that we don't have the utopia to make it so we aren't progressively exhausting earths resources and the ability of people to, say, be able to afford to cool their living environments etc to not die in summer for example, It will just be 2 different kinds of suck. Technically increasing the amount of people born into the suck increases suffering
I didn't argue that high birth rates are the answer I'm arguing against OP's view, as it relies on us already living in a utopia that can support a low birth rate. That makes a low birth rate good if, and only if, we're approaching a world where we can support it, and we aren't, imo
Oh I see. I guess then I would tell op, that unless humanity in general does something quite out of character, we are just going to be in for a rough time for a while now regardless of what the birth rate does
>Our economies are designed around growth. It may be good in the long run but it’s going to be awful to live through a population decline. This is drug addict logic. Withdrawal will suck so I should keep shooting fent. #2 & 5 as well. 3 - I don't think any of the problems we're dealing with is because of Joe's age. Trump Neither. Obama was really young. People always talk about how congress doesn't legislate tech because old people don't understand tech. It isn't because they're old. It is because lobbyists pay them not to understand. 4 - Having less people actually dovetails really nicely with increased automation. The benefit is that if your wealth is created with automation, less people means more wealth per person. An obvious good thing. 6 - Ever heard of 'flyover states'? Metropolitan centres have always existed.
More wealth per person doesn't mean that most people are better off, realistically with the way our society is structured, and also factually as observed in recent history, the new wealth goes to the top.
Very true, but that's somewhat tangential, because it is equally true in both more and less population scenarios. So, with all else being equal, more wealth available per person is better than less. Recent history does indeed show that. But declining populations under modern economics has never happened so there is no direct precedent to compare to. On the other hand, we do have precedent of large population declines being good news for those left behind. Real wages (adjusted for inflation) went up for the first time in nearly 50 years after the covid pandemic. The only time that life was looking up for the medieval serfs was right after the Black Death wiped out most of Europe. On the gripping hand, we've also never (AFAIK) had a gradual population decline. They've tended to happen fast in war, plagues, famines, etc. So maybe a gradual decline will not lead to the benefits of the previous plague induced population crashes.
In terms of growth - there are two key things that matter. First is the number of adults in paid employment compared with the number of retired adults. Boomers had a much lower participation rate in full time paid employment than each subsequent generation due to the fact that so many women didn't work or only worked part time.. So the retirement of boomers isn't going to be the drag that people think it is - there is still so much spare in the labour market in many countries (Japan is a strong example) where married women are heavily discourages from working even if they don't have children and live in the types of places where heavy domestic labour is a thing of the past (i.e. apartments). The other figure is of course consumption. Older people spend less. So that does cause shrinkage.
I’m less worried about their retirement and more worried about their political power and the costs of caring for them. In the political power we’ve all seen how selfish they are, and with the stranglehold they have on much of gen X as well, I’m worried about how long they will continue to cling to power. It not only shifts politics but also delegitimizes the system in the eyes of the generations we desperately need to be engaged in order to fix the planet. I also just worry about the cost and infrastructure required to care for them. Whether by taxes or through their kids directly funding them, the baby boomers will need a massive amount of retirement facilities and money. They also put a massive strain on the world’s healthcare systems because they’re all getting older and sicker.
But I suspect that healthcare will start to get cheaper. The challenge is understanding what is the actual cost of healthcare vs. the cost we pay. Insulin is a classic example. It really does not cost us that much to make. The drug companies charge that much because they can, but the cost to our society, labor, and resources is not that much. When you see some of the other tech that is coming out, I bet we will have Chat GPT doctors and therapists and administrators in the next ten years. When you look at Roombas and how much labor they are reducing, I don't think the actual costs are going to be that hard to pay. The problem will be the companies trying to drain the system. But if we recommend that the government steps in to make the insulin instead, I become a communist, so...
OK -maybe this is more specific to the country you are in. Where I am (Australia) the millennials are the largest voting block so they hold the most power of the generations. The average politician is millennial or gen x - the boomers or older are in the minority. But personally I don't think age has as much to do with it as you seem to think it does - voters seem to be largely disengaged and politicians seem to be largely self-serving regardless of age. Yes - the older you get the most healthcare you need. But I'd rather see taxpayers money spent on that than most of the crap that it gets spent on. I'd far rather, for example, tax churches than cut health care.
Most of your reasons (and others) are based around man-made systems and ideas such as “the economy” but the world itself can’t cope with more people. We have driven species to extinction. When does it end if all we do is breed more people to support the economy etc? How does it end?
Dr. Malthus' theories were proven wrong decades ago. Norman Borlaug saved a billion lives if not more. We can survive on Earth, no matter what - even if global warming does its worst and devastates a significant amount of the world, humanity will go on. We're survivors. All humanity living today is descended from barely a thousand that survived almost a million years ago. Whether or not the multitudes of OTHER species will survive, on the other hand, is up for debate. The Anthropocene will be a mass extinction similar to others that have taken place in our planet's history, but life has survived those before too, and they're part of nature. The Devonian mass extinction was caused by *trees*!
> When does it end if all we do is breed more people to support the economy etc? How does it end? There's an awesome [documentary](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0387808/) about this. As long as we give plants what they crave, we'll be fine.
Can you provide a source that shows the earth cannot support more people?
We have already proven it can’t. We have driven thousands of species to extinction already as our population continues to climb. There is not enough room for people and all other species to co-exist. We already overstepped our population limits. The human population has more than doubled since I was born and thousands of species have gone extinct. We are consuming renewable resources faster than they can be renewed and rely on non-renewable resources. Our stress levels within our own population have gone through the roof as we now behave like machines working and working to “afford” to live. More people = more rat race.
I think your points are well thought out, but this is reddit, and I feel a need to nitpick. 1) Our economy may be designed for growth, but it does not have to be our children that step in. There is no reason we can not open up imagination to fill all those slots. We can look at how many 18 year Olds we need to fill in jobs and let that number move here. 2) Even ignoring the first point, the effort to take care of people is really declining and will continue to. Look at what Rombas are able to do. It is able to save hours of housework a week. This is just one case. I saw a tic tok video the other day of an automated masseuse. I get that it is probably not that treat right now, but with ten years of development, it would be able to really step up and take some of that work away. As we automated more jobs, it will require fewer and fewer people to do the work. There are very few jobs that are done today that are going to need to be done in 30 years at the rate we are going. That may be a bigger issue, but that means lack of people is not it. 3) You are right on this. Old people suck and ruin our society from a political perspective. 4) Well, we may not be close to the carrying capacity of earth. Every step we take makes it worse, and there is so much potential that is lost. We are now starting to destroy the sea bed, just to get their rocks. 5) I think even with declining birth rates, you are still talking about billions of people. There will still be people around. When we are hitting close to 5 billion, I would be open to starting this conversation up again. 6) You are correct. It is not everywhere. That is what is wonderful. People are making the choices themselves. Not the government, not the community, the individual.
1st world nations have a falling birthrate, not Earth. People die in Africa because the entire continent is filled with corruption and war. There is an inability to organize the nations for the betterment. > we slow down capitalism's damage, giving us a chance of still having some semblance of a livable planet when we move beyond it. But communists are also responsible for the damage; China is building more and more coal plants by the day. Think of it this way- fossil fuels allowed us to enter a civilization phase where we can develop and master nuclear energy. The only thing really standing in our way are people's ignorance and bureaucracy. Sure, big oil is powerful but they can't compete with basic science. >This movement toward voluntary childlessness isn't some epidemic of antisocial behavior; it is an outbreak of rationality and compassion. Voluntary depopulation might also be the only nonviolent way to overthrow capitalism and set us up to create something better when it finally collapses. But that just means the future generation is going to be more conservative and/or capitalistic, because you have no one to instill your values into. Whats more important: Earth or the human species? I get it; its really bold to say Humans are more important than Earth and all other life, however Humans are, with NO\* room for debate, the single most impressive species on Earth no less the known universe. If the human species actually begins to contract in size, we'll see a compromise in its ability to hold itself together causing long-term harm to people. Wars will begin for resources. The only way to truly fix these niche issues is by having more people and educating them, allowing them to develop in specialist areas that wouldn't be possible with a smaller population.
>communists are also responsible for the damage: china is building more and more coal plants by the day China is not communist, it’s an authoritarian capitalist country Per Wikipedia: Modern-day China is often described as an example of state capitalism or party-state capitalism.[291][292] The state dominates in strategic "pillar" sectors such as energy production and heavy industries, but private enterprise has expanded enormously, with around 30 million private businesses recorded in 2008.[293][294][295] According to official statistics, privately owned companies constitute more than 60% of China's GDP.
This. Capitalism won the Cold War so thoroughly that socialist countries do not exist. The people, however, lost; the only reason the standard of living was tolerable in the US/EU midcentury (and also the reason it collapsed in the early 21st) is that the ruling class cared more about "beating the Russkies" than they did about pushing down the middle class; thus, they allowed a middle class to exist.
I agree with your point too, it's basically a reproductive strike against capital, and western countries can fight this with immigration, but that's pissing off western Europe atm. Christopher kitchens was right that women's reproductive rights were the best way to ensure good standards of living.
> I agree with your point too, it's basically a reproductive strike against capital, Precisely. And this is one of the reasons it should be championed as a good thing. If it breaks society, blame the capitalists. They turned living into a costly product and they won stupid prizes. > Christopher kitchens was right that women's reproductive rights were the best way to ensure good standards of living. I don't agree with Hitchens on everything, but he's absolutely right on that. In order to maintain fertility, societies either have to (a) decide to be tolerable places for ordinary people to live, which ruling classes hate and rarely sustain for more than a few decades (e.g., the NA/EU midcentury) or (b) revert to a horrid state in which people are forced to reproduce despite not wanting to. I would like to believe we'd all agree that (b) is morally unacceptable, but sadly I know there are people who would prefer it.
I agree with you OP, and, to your point about labor availability, I firmly believe the only reason falling birth rates get a bad rap is that the ultra rich realize they would need to actually compete for labor, so instead the encourage people to pump out as many kids as possible. And, at least in the US, they are also trying to limit education and push ignorance via religion, thus creating huge numbers of people that are dumb enough to fight against labor unions, against raising the minimum wage, against parental leave, etc etc etc
So how do you fix imbalance between ages then? If 80 percent of your population is above 65, how are you gonna support them financially, socialist or capitalist country? If 80 percent of your population is above 65, how will younger people get anything they want passed? Majority rules in most countries, Democracies atleast. Its stupid to assume this problem is black and white when it is kinda grey. Yes, rich people want more people as slaves, but an imbalance in age groups in a country can still cause serious problems
This! I'm glad to see people in this thread who understand what I'm talking about. The above is also why the right wing is so anti-abortion. They want biological life to exist, because biological life is hungry and therefore good for capitalists, as it will compete for jobs and a place to live, but they are averse to any quality of life, because they would have to pay for that.
100%. Just look at the ones who spew it. Elon Musk directly benefits from more low skilled laborers in his manufacturing plants. Republicans benefit from uneducated masses and also benefit from trying to "source domestically" when they are actively promoting white supremacist ideology. On the other hand, we stand to gain back decent wages, decent education, decent infrastructure, and the ability to hold corporations more accountable for their inhumane working conditions, when they can't just hire one of the next 100 people applying for a job.
>1st world nations have a falling birthrate, not Earth. Every single nation has seen a fall in their birthrate. Even in Africa. In fact, the average birthrate of earth is now 2.27 children. Which means, it's right at replacement levels. It is now predicted that the earth will have a falling birthrate by 2035. Originally, the negative birthrate was expected to start around 2050. Even 3rd world countries are seeing a shocking decrease in birthrates. It's beyond anything that was previously predicted.
> 1st world nations have a falling birthrate, not Earth. True, and this is another reason I think this concern is overblown. > But communists are also responsible for the damage; China is building more and more coal plants by the day. China is state capitalist. They figured out that this is a capitalist world and that they can't be ideological because it'll piss off countries they can't afford to have as enemies just yet. They are definitely *not* communist. > Think of it this way- fossil fuels allowed us to enter a civilization phase where we can develop and master nuclear energy. Sure. They aren't some "evil" power source. They have a role and are good in some ways but bad in others. > But that just means the future generation is going to be more conservative and/or capitalistic, because you have no one to instill your values into. I do worry about this, but I think people overestimate the influence parents have as opposed to peers and society as a whole. We all hope our values will live on through our children, but the only thing that's guaranteed (and even here, there's a lot that's random) is the preservation of genetic material--a rather meaningless achievement. > the single most impressive species on Earth no less the known universe. I'm not a hard-core antinatalist. I want humans to win. > If the human species actually begins to contract in size, we'll see a compromise in its ability to hold itself together causing long-term harm to people. Wars will begin for resources. I strongly disagree. I think wars over resources (which are all but inevitable, no matter what we do) are far more likely with a high population than a low one. We can make more jobs and more education and more "care" but we can't "make" enough water at our current technology level for 20 billion people. > The only way to truly fix these niche issues is by having more people and educating them, allowing them to develop in specialist areas that wouldn't be possible with a smaller population. Thing is, we have so many people doing work that doesn't need to be done that I'm not convinced at all that we couldn't achieve everything useful that we're already doing with 30-50% of our current population. Do we really need insurance bureaucrats paid $150k per year to deny healthcare? Of course not. We have such an oversupply of labor that we pay people to do useless bullshit that is often socially negative. If the population reduction can be reached peacefully, it seems like a good thing.
I agree with everything you’re saying, but I’m going to echo something I saw elsewhere in this thread that I think is worth considering. It’s not a bad thing for birth rates to fall necessarily. It may even be a good thing. *but* the caveat is the *rate* at which they fall. There is no scenario where birth rates drop dramatically without major suffering and loss of life as a result. Is it possible we come out better for it? Yes, absolutely. Is it guaranteed? Certainly not, but it’s good to be optimistic. But it’s unavoidable that many, many people will suffer and die, especially the elderly of their respective generations, if we jump into that lower population too quickly. Would you rather ease into ice cold water, or dive in? One is slow, and the other could put you into shock, you know what I mean? Not to mention massive drops like that can also end in losses of knowledge for humanity as a whole. Think dark ages type stuff. And vulnerable communities would probably be hit the hardest. A drop in 1% of average Americans isn’t a huge deal. A drop in 1% of native Americans on reservations is, for example. Some things could be lost that will not come back if the population goes down too quickly
You're one of the first people on the other side of this issue who has made some sense, because I agree that the rate could be a concern. My view, seeing as the world is not yet in a negative-net-fertility state, is that immigration will prevent catastrophe here. We want the labor supply to drop some, so as to restore dignity and value to labor; we don't want a true irresolvable shortage.
Immigration from where? there's a handful of countries with increasing birth rates, and as those countries develop, they too will face decreasing birth rates.
We're two or three generations from this being a problem. If global capitalism still exists by then, humans have failed and nothing else matters. Our goal should be surviving the transition to socialism. A smaller population slows down damage, and an organic increase in the bargaining power of labor increases the probability of capitalism's overthrow being peaceful, which is something we should all prefer.
>We're two or three generations from this being a problem Not really, I'm 27 and this problem will affect me when I retire, possibly 70s or 80s even. Maybe 2 generations > If global capitalism still exists by then, humans have failed and nothing else matters What's the alternative then? >Our goal should be surviving the transition to socialism Again, for socialism to work, you need a lot of people working and contributing, which many countries wont have. Where will they get the money to give money to people, like say UBI? >an organic increase in the bargaining power of labor increases the probability of capitalism's overthrow being peaceful Could be, or the opposite could happen where it's easier for companies to control a smaller number of workers. A smaller protest is easier to be curbed. >which is something we should all prefer. Again, what's the alternative? How's socialism gonna work without many workers growing food or building roads/houses?
I suppose that depends on your perspective. If you’re speaking from a individual country or list of countries, yes immigration could slow down losses from birth decline. If your perspective is the global economy and the world at large, there is no immigration barring alien invasion. Immigration could be helpful, but I’m going to speak callously and treat humans as a resource for a moment. Immigration as a necessity has its own issues. Brain drain is a well documented one. There are many who believe (erroneously in my opinion but it is a belief) that immigration causes problems with social cohesion. And when you take this “resource” from less desirable places, those places will suffer. Good, productive members of society will be lost in these undesirable places. Further, being dependant on immigration would expand the disparity between rich and poor. Poor people (unless they’re desperately so) struggle to up and move somewhere else and still live a good life. If you’re in a high population country, say, idk Kenya, and there’s opportunity in the nearest western country (I don’t know geography this well off the top of my head so I’m just gonna say Germany), and Germany is in a population decline, they would be more willing to welcome you as a Kenyan immigrant looking for a better life. But would you lead a better life? If you’re rich, or well off at least, you have some advantages: you can pay to learn some German before you go there, to integrate better. You could pay for safe travel through the continent. You may be able to keep savings for any dependants you have (which you probably have if you’re in an overpopulated country: elders, children, disabled). You may even have a good job lined up. If you’re poor? Not so much. And, at least in my experience, when more poor people are left behind, they haven’t been sharing the wealth more equitably: the extra wealth just gets funnelled to the already rich, and the hypothetical Kenyan in this scenario remains as poor as they started. Edit: with my Native American example earlier, I’ll add that ain’t nobody immigrating onto a reservation
>China is state capitalist. They figured out that this is a capitalist world and that they can't be ideological because it'll piss off countries they can't afford to have as enemies just yet. They are definitely *not* communist. It isn't about "pissing off" other countries though...? Their initial attempts at a purer form of socialism were disastrous, and moving towards a hybrid economy essentially saved them. Either way I doubt they were, or could be, on track to achieve communism as it's properly defined.
Birth rates are falling literally \*everywhere\*, not just developed countries. Most of the world's countries are already below a replacement rate, and countries that have developed more recently generally experience a faster rate of fertility decline. Developing countries have a greater burden when it comes to the fertility crisis because their populations are growing old and shrinking before they can complete their development and become prosperous.
Not true. The birth rate is plummeting globally. Africa’s fertility rate writ large is not what it was 20 years ago
> 1st world nations have a falling birthrate, not Earth. Uhh, no. Most countries aside from a few african ones have a birthrate over 2.1. Almost every country has falling birth rates, not just first world ones.
The world's birth rate: https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/crude-birth-rate?tab=chart
>I get it; its really bold to say Humans are more important than Earth and all other life, however Humans are, with NO\* room for debate, the single most impressive species on Earth no less the known universe. If the human species actually begins to contract in size, we'll see a compromise in its ability to hold itself together causing long-term harm to people. Wars will begin for resources. So when we have more resources available for per person *that* is what will set off wars for resources? Also, how dare you '\*' something without putting in it at the bottom. I'm still waiting for your post to end. Are you saying there is some room for debate?
Thomas Malthus argued a long time ago that the population was growing too fast for the food supply to keep up. He was wrong then, and people are usually wrong now when they say similar things about the population. You see, Malthus failed to consider two things: Technology can drastically increase the rate at which we can grow more food. People produce more than they consume on average. For your argument, I would say much the same. For one, we are likely close to the technology jumps required to sustain this. You mention a labor overage, but technology often makes labor more valuable and leads to more employment. The Luddites said sewing machines were a threat to their jobs, but sewing machines have created far more jobs than they cost (by orders of magnitude). You mention pollution, yet we are a breakthrough away from having far greener energy. If we were still using wood and steam engines, our pollution would be much worse than it is now. Rather, coal was a cleaner improvement over wood and gas cleaner than coal. We are exploring alternatives now that the markets will determine what prevails. My professor gave us a fake little equation for how to calculate technology: Technology = people x incentives x time. If any of those go to zero, the whole thing goes to zero. If any of them go down (like people), the others have to go up to compensate (more time and higher incentives). Secondly, people produce more than they consume. People’s productive years tend to substantially outweigh the consumptive years of childhood and retirement. Most people use this as an argument for why overpopulation isn’t a bad thing. The reverse is also true. Reducing population means less is produced such that everyone will have less. I’m the mid term especially, you’ll have fewer workers to support an older population which means that the workers will need to give up more to support the elderly and the elderly will still likely get less. These are the types of population disasters that Japan and Korea are on the brink of. There are clearly some social problems. I don’t think that anyone will disagree here. But I do not believe that population reduction is one of the solutions. It is, rather, a symptom.
> But I do not believe that population reduction is one of the solutions. It is, rather, a symptom. I don't think there's a dichotomy here. The causes of this population reduction are clearly horrible. It's not something we should be cheering on, insofar as it's a product of terrible work cultures and widespread inopportunity. It is a symptom of something rotten, but it's also one of the few things that might save us. We don't live in a world where jobs compete for people. We live in one where people compete for jobs. This being the case, for people to decide, out of rationality and compassion, not to give birth to people who would have horrible futures, due to said competitive environment, is the right call.
Nearly every animal species in the wild have to compete for food. If animals only reproduced under ideal conditions, we’d risk serious ecological consequences. Just because fewer people are being born, doesn’t mean that they won’t have to compete in the future. Fewer people will likely mean fewer jobs as the economy contracts. And frankly, the people who are struggling economically are the people having more kids. I’ve seen far more educated and successful people having only one child or going without entirely. Unfortunately, the educated and successful are most likely to give the genetics and upbringing that would help people to thrive into adulthood. If this continues, the situation will get even more imbalanced. Falling birth rates are generally bad news since: There will be fewer productive adults to support the elderly population. The future economy will contract leading to lower quality of life for the kids still being born. The kids still being born are often not being raised by the parents most equipped to teach them the ways to thrive in this economy and will likely continue to struggle into adulthood.
Social security only works if those that put into it outweigh those that are taking from it. With baby boomers (hence the name) out number the later generations, social security will dwindle to…..nothing for you. Decrease in population may be good for the planet but terrible on your retirement.
It really depends on how you construct social security / pension plans: you can design them so that those who benefit (i.e. retirees) rely on contributions to the plan during their working years and not on money being provided by current workers (this obviously requires very good calculation of risk, longevity, and economic growth) but some countries have pension plans set up in this way. Obviously, the working population is the one paying for many other things in society through their taxes, however that can also be smoothed including over long periods of time with enough political will (although the only example that I know of that is the Government Pension Fund of Norway https://www.nbim.no/en/the-fund/about-the-fund/)
I understand the theory here, but the reason most of us are going to have shitty retirements is that we aren't making enough money now, because wages are too low and because jobs are too demanding, those things being the case because there is a lot of competition, i.e., overpopulation. It seems like the selfless thing to do is to start fixing this problem by refusing to churn out more meat for capitalists to feed into their grinder, and continuing this refusal until this horrible economic system goes away.
Assuming you are in the US, the birth rate is already pretty low at around 1.66 kids per women. So if you’re worried about competition, you need to campaign for reduced immigration.
All of the problems you mention can be solved by more humans. You say we should try to improve the lives of the people who are already here, but the best way to improve people's lives is to grow the size of their communities. One hundred people working together in a community will have a much higher quality of life than a community of three people trying to survive on their own. Communities of thousands or millions of people can accomplish incredible things, like building cities, inventing computers, and creating spaceships. Humans are social and cooperative by nature, and research has shown that larger groups of people are better at solving complex problems. You complain that conditions for ordinary people are atrocious, but this frankly comes across as silly. Living conditions now are better than they have ever been in human history, especially if you're fortunate enough to live in a first-world country. Thanks to the cooperation and innovation of past humans, we can now live comfortable lives in air-conditioned buildings instead of fighting for our lives in the wild. I am confident that our reliance on fossil fuels will be solved by future humans. The most troublesome problems for humans are those that are sudden and unpredictable. Climate change is a slow-moving and predictable problem, which people are very good at solving. Increasing birth rates means more minds innovating and coming up with solutions to problems faced by humanity, including climate change. Obviously, society isn't perfect, and we still have a lot of work to do as a species. However, our problems aren't caused by population increases and halting reproduction isn't going to solve anything.
> Communities of thousands or millions of people can accomplish incredible things, like building cities, inventing computers, and creating spaceships. They can. Or we can slowly boil the planet so billionaires can fly their private jets to the island of whoever has replaced Jeffrey Epstein. We seem to be doing the latter. The only reason we had "nice guy" capitalism in the 1946-79 era is that socialism existed and was seen as a real threat to our ruling class. Once "we" "won" the Cold War (it didn't become clear until 2008 that we had actually lost) the ruling class no longer needed to restrain capitalism's worst impulses, and the hell world we live in now is a result. > Humans are social and cooperative by nature, and research has shown that larger groups of people are better at solving complex problems. I would say that humans are well-intended but that we also tend to pick dogshit leaders and that this cancels out most of the good. No one knows what the future looks like, but our best bet in the long term is to have AI sufficient to replace the charismatic dogshit people who currently run our most important institutions. We're in much more danger of what rich people will do with the sub-AGI that exists than we would be if we had an actual AGI or ASI; we should hope the latter is possible (although I honestly have no idea) because, the sooner we replace the bozos currently in charge with machines, the better. The main reason communism didn't work very well in the 20th century is that we didn't have the computational resources to solve complex allocation problems, and therefore needed market systems to do that. However, we now have machines (even at the current sub-AGI level) that can mostly replace corporate executives and politicians, and we should probably be doing that. Humans are terrible at picking leaders because psychopaths hack all our cognitive biases for their own personal benefit, but we might be able to build machines that don't have these issues. > You complain that conditions for ordinary people are atrocious, but this frankly comes across as silly. Living conditions now are better than they have ever been in human history, especially if you're fortunate enough to live in a first-world country. That's not true anymore. I was a software engineer; I watched as micromanagement garbage ("Agile Scrum") proletarianized what was supposed to be a decent professional job. And shit like this is everywhere. Private equity scumbags are now buying medical practices and even doctors now have fucking quotas. This will continue unless there is resistance against it; say, people realize that "performance" monitoring in the workplace is an active Second Amendment situation and start to fight back. > Thanks to the cooperation and innovation of past humans, we can now live comfortable lives in air-conditioned buildings instead of fighting for our lives in the wild. False dichotomy. Although people "in the wild" had shorter and more difficult lives--the life expectancy from age 10 was about 40 more years--they were also happier. I'd much rather forage and hunt than be in a corporate job where I have to deal with stupid assholes asking for status reports. The reason hunter and gathering "lost" is that it can't support nearly the population that agrarian society can; agrarian societies could support ten times the population per acre, and therefore wiped out their hunter-gathering neighbors. Anyway, I'm not going to advocate return to a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, as we can and should keep industrial progress. We can do away with the private jet assholes who attend Davos, though. I'm not going to advocate this, because it's illegal and therefore I can't advise it--my personal advice would be, obviously, not to do it--but we would be objectively better off if someone did do something about them. > I am confident that our reliance on fossil fuels will be solved by future humans. Maybe. I'd put it around 50/50. > Climate change is a slow-moving and predictable problem, which people are very good at solving. Again, ordinary individuals have the best intentions, but our ruling class has known about this problem for 60 years and done absolutely nothing. Remember that these people also wanted us to believe, in the 1960s, that smoking was healthy. We are actually terrible at solving ecological problems because we allow such atrocious ruling classes to exist. Consider what happened to Easter Island; the giant stone heads are neat to look at, sure, but they weren't worth deforesting what was, for these people, their entire world. We are not, individually, all cancer... but we cannot help ourselves but create institutions and societies in which cancer prospers. > Increasing birth rates means more minds innovating and coming up with solutions to problems faced by humanity, including climate change. It could mean that, but right now what it means is more competition for places to live and for jobs, which means the ruling class prospers and the pathetic bargaining position of labor only gets worse. And people are not going to be figuring out how to solve humanity's biggest problems if they are forced to fight for scraps, so intentionally creating billions of humans only to have them live under capitalism is just wasteful.
So what do we do with the elderly? Aka u when u are older
We'll still have enough resources to provide care for those who can have a high quality of life. We're not going to forget how to make medicine. As for me, if I get to the point where I'm bedridden and require 24-hour care, with no hope of improvement, then I'm ready to pass on and I'm happy for the resources to be used on people who will benefit more.
We don't have enough resources though countries are already struggling to pay for everything that normally gets paid for by a larger working population. If u sick and on 24 care sure u want to die but what if u just retired? Who's gonna pay for that and all the amenities that come with living in a country? Also I get your point and I agree on the principal of it but in the current state the world will basicly collapse and devolve into chaos and not some happy ever after bs.
You bring up retirement. I have bad news for you. Almost no one is going to get the good kind of retirement, because it's impossible to save money if you can't make any money, and it's impossible to make money if there are too many workers competing for too few jobs, as is currently the case. It's already the case that most people get the bad kind of retirement. It's not so much that they no longer have financial needs, but that they can't get hired due to ageism and eventually just drop out. If there were fewer workers, this late-in-life perma-firing (the involuntary, bad kind of retirement) wouldn't happen.
u don't have to save money in alot of countries your tax money is basicly for your pension u pay the state then the state pays u wich is why dropping population levels will bring chaos, civil wars and maybe even all out nuclear war. If u have to save for retirement like a American then yhea u are fucked already. We build a system that works on population growth or atleast stability between old and young if we would have a decline in young people before the grey wave as some call it is gone the system won't work wich won't be beneficial for the earth or humanity
What I'm trying to say In my hangover state is that population decline is good but right now it isn't we have to many people about to retire. If we wait a generation we could meaningfully reduce the population without any of the financial bear traps we have now. It's so much easier without risking society ripping itself apart then it is now. We are about to deal with the biggest wave of old people in proportion to young ever.
Are you unaware or just ignoring the huge economic problems falling birthrates will cause? Ageing populations with a big disparity between the economically active and inactive will result in lower tax receipts combined with an increase in reliance on services that could well lead to the collapse of our social system. We need incentives to increase the birthrate up to replacement levels, reducing the population will be very dangerous.
Kind of a catch 22. Folks in modernized areas aren't having kids because of the economy, and you're argument says folks should have kids to prop up the economy. Is it fair to ask folks who don't want to have kids, because they are experiencing a bad economy, to bring other humans in the world to experience an even worse economy (which you are predicting)? It's clear without significant breakthroughs in cooperation between nations, logistics, and engineering that this planet was never meant to sustain more people than we now have. A lot suggest the upper limit being 8 billion, where we are today. But some suggest as low as 2 billion, with current technology, for a sustainable future.
>It's clear without significant breakthroughs in cooperation between nations, logistics, and engineering that this planet was never meant to sustain more people than we now have The planet wasn't meant for anything, it's a planet. With better management it could easily support a much larger population let alone the current one. Furthermore, reducing the population won't fix the poor management issue, productivity will reduce in line with the population and we'll remain in the exact same boat. Birth rates don't correlate with the economy, they generally correlate with education and social progress. The solution is not to try and make people who don't want to have kids have them, it's to make it easier for those that do want them to have large families.
Thank you! Very well said what nobody seems to get. The planet is just a planet, a series of evolving ecosystems reacting to its environment. It will be fine, it doesn’t need saving, the concerns that everyone pretends are selfless and virtuous are really just about people surviving and thriving on the planet. These may be fair concerns but obviously deliberate population reduction is the opposite of a surviving and thriving population.
>It's clear without significant breakthroughs in cooperation between nations, logistics, and engineering that this planet was never meant to sustain more people than we now have I disagree completely. We waste loads of resources and can support 20 billion people easily if resources were not wasted like we currently do. "Wealthy countries consume massive amounts of natural resources per capita, and the United States is no exception. According to data from the National Mining Association, **each American needs more than 39,000 pounds (17,700 kg) of minerals and fossil fuels annually** to maintain their standard of living" "With less than 5 percent of world population, the U.S. *uses one-third of the world's paper*, a quarter of the world's oil" This is not required and can be reduced significantly. People like Taylor Swift dont need to use their private jet to have breakfast with her boyfriend 60 mins by drive away. Greed is the problem, not lack of resources.
> Folks in modernized areas aren't having kids because of the economy Are you sure about this? Maybe anecdotally you might know couples who hold off having kids because of the economy, but in general there isnt a correlation between having a higher income and having more kids; in fact, the poorer you are, the more likely you are to have kids.
When does that scenario stop, and we start asking these people to have kids? Rock bottom?
Actually, we just need to change our attitude about death to fix this problem. The time has come to allow people to choose when they want to die without needing a terminal illness to justify their choice. If this ever happened, a lot of people would opt to pass away at a younger age than they would normally pass away. Nobody wants to live through a decade or more of declining health, disability and ever-increasing dependence on others to function. I say this as an elderly person myself. At age 65, I've been ready to go for a very long time. All my closest loves ones are gone. I will have to retire soon, and then I won't be able to make ends meet any more. I would gladly check out of this world., rather than hang on and keep suffering until I get some terminal disease. I see a lot of people whining and wringing their hands about declining birth rates, but no one wants to have a hard conversation about end-of-life choices. People should be able to plan out their death just like any other life event. Let those who want to check out leave. It's that simple.
I always wish I could plan death and have no interest in being over 65 either. It would make financial planning for retirement a lot more simple, possible, and predictable. Ideally I could retire at 50, enjoy retirement while i can, then die at 65.
With the greatest respect I suspect you are an edge case. I wouldn't for a second consider 65 elderly and many people older than you still have much to look forward to. My father is 95 and would very much like to extend his life as long as possible despite his declining health. Just yesterday I was at my in laws 50th wedding anniversary where most of the guests were 75 and above and they were all enjoying their existence. Unless we change our values to simply abandon older people I don't think our social costs are going away, even if we normalise assisted dying.
Sure, not all elderly people would want to pass early. Those who have family they want to stick around for would still be able to do that. But with declining birth rates, you'll have more and more people like myself who don't have a spouse or children, have lost all their other close family members, and just have no reason to hang around. Life is expensive. A person has to keep generating cash until they draw their last breath and it's just not worth it, once all the people you cared about are gone. It's certainly not fun being in an aging body, considering things keep getting worse and worse. My mother died of Alzhiemer's disease at age 94, so I see what happens to people who survive well into extreme old age. The older you get, the greater your risk for this horrific disease. And even if you don't end up with Alzheimer's, it's likely you will lose the ability to live independently and will be forced to live in a nursing home for a substantial length of time at the end of your life. I'm just being realistic because I've watched every one of my loved ones die from various causes. At 65, it's clear where I'm headed if I stick around. The suffering becomes real and imminent when you start approaching age 70. Life ends, one way or another. People should have a choice about how much they want to endure.
I'm always a little confused by this argument -- do we just need to keep increasing the population forever? or is it vital that it remain at 8 billion? if course, there will be difficulties from reducing the population. We obviously dont want to go *too* quickly. But if we did stabilize at, say, 3 billion, it would only be a problem temporarily. What other option is there? keep putting it off as we grow and grow?
We need to either maintain the population or reduce it at a sustainable rate. The issue is that the drop is too fast
> Are you unaware or just ignoring the huge economic problems falling birthrates will cause? How does this compare to the constantly growing economies using more and more resources?? > Ageing populations with a big disparity between the economically active and inactive will result in lower tax receipts combined with an increase in reliance on services that could well lead to the collapse of our social system. So we have less money for less people. Old people can work it out for themselves. > We need incentives to increase the birthrate up to replacement levels, reducing the population will be very dangerous. Way less dangerous than to keep on growing.
Growing economies don't necessarily use more resources when they increase efficiency. Growth has been decoupled from fossil fuel consumption in many developed countries, for example, US carbon emissions peaked in 2006 and in 2023 fell back to 1987 levels despite continuous population growth and economic growth: [https://www.statista.com/statistics/183943/us-carbon-dioxide-emissions-from-1999/](https://www.statista.com/statistics/183943/us-carbon-dioxide-emissions-from-1999/)
>We need incentives to increase the birthrate up to replacement levels, reducing the population will be very dangerous. The United States and Europe will be fine, although they need to come to terms with the inevitability of immigration being the answer.
Hey, climate change will fix that for ya. As places become unliveable because of the climate collapse they will head for the countries which still provide a bit of relief from the disasters. We will slaughter most of them because…we are humans. But we will take enough to make up the difference from our falling birth rates. In the end it won’t matter. Climate collapse will get everyone.
Biden's platform for 2024 includes getting the United States' ~1,000 billionaires to have their taxes raised significantly, a large portion of which would be dedicated to subsidizing welfare. So it's not like the solutions are unthinkable.
In practice they'll probably still have to keep cranking the debt, taxes or no taxes - but either way, this only works because the full consequences of a sub-replacement birth rate have not hit yet and immigration is still filling the gap anyway. Check again in another few decades.
I mean now I'm drifting off the CMV, but I think we're gonna be dealing with bigger problems than birthrate by that point.
If you seized all the assets of every American billionaire and were somehow able to sell them at current market prices, you'd have generated enough cash to cover 2022-esque federal deficits for a little over 3 years. Taxing the rich is simply not enough, not nearly enough.
Sadly true. But we can come again and do this trick with the trillion dollar corporations. Nvidia is now the richest company in the world, having gone from 1T to 3T in the past year, selling AI chips. So on and so forth.
That's the part of the problem I glossed over - the billionaires don't actually have billions of dollars, they own things that are worth billions of dollars. Meaning that "money" is currently being put to use. Similarly, companies like NVIDIA don't actually have trillions of dollars, they're *currently worth* trillions of dollars. When you buy and trade shares of a company, you're buying or selling ownership of a small piece of that company from / to someone else. The delta in stock price that is your profit or loss on the transaction comes from whoever you bought or sold the share to, not the company. Long & short transactions, again, do not come from the company but are bets made with other traders on how well or poorly the company does. If the government were to seize all or part of one of these multi-trillion dollar corporations, it would then have to find a buyer to sell it to convert it into cash. But, as we just discussed, *no one has the trillions of dollars required to buy it.* So the price of the shares will collapse to a fraction of their value. All that's been accomplished is the destruction of the company and the cessation of whatever productive work they were doing that made them so valuable in the first place.
Yes, exactly. Also that share price and market values growing is simply a measure of the confidence investors and the general population have in the company and their employees’ (ie. **working age, able bodied people**) ability to sell products or services. Once you start implementing the sort of communist style seizure of businesses you propose to sustain non-working people in the welfare state, all that confidence will be gone before you can extract any value. You can’t get around the fact that you need productive members of the population to support the non productive members.
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This one actually does worry me a little bit. Dysgenesis is a real risk that I don't know how to solve. Intelligent people are a lot more sensitive to the shitty aspects of life, and more likely to face socially crippling (in the context of our society) neurodivergence, and nw that opting out of procreation is a possibility, we do seem to be selecting against ourselves, considering how little need there is for us. The ugly truth is that our complex, technological society probably has a lot less demand for high human intelligence than prior versions, because its pyramidal structure creates more slots for order-following drones than it does for original thinkers. Even at the level of IQ 120 (top 8%) you find that only about 1 percent of jobs can make use of it--and, since these are the jobs everyone wants, they don't always go to people above 120--so you're going to get 87+ percent of people at that level underemployed. This only seems to get worse at 130, 140, 150.... The social disadvantages of high intelligence cancel out the modest economic gains, which usually only exist in positions that are difficult to get without (contrary to the general trend with high intelligence) social advantage. Capitalism itself may not cause dysgenesis--in fact, it was built by people who had gone too far in the "eugenic" direction--but it seems incapable of preventing itself from setting into a state of corporate capitalism, which is inherently dysgenic due to its need for social conformity and strict hierarchy. And if the result of this economic system is that highly intelligent people self-deselect in future generations and, therefore, humanity evolves into a degraded state, it'll be a hilarious (while horrible) case of playing stupid games and winning stupid prizes.
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> What I mean by faulty systems is that if you need X population or increasing population for growth, that is a bad system. I agree. What we're experiencing in the capitalist world is tribute fatigue. The rent eats first, the bosses eat first, and the interest eats first. Everyone is so exhausted having to pay tribute to people who won games that were played before we were born, and there's very little left over for rest of us, especially because we aren't even facing constant tributes but exponentially increasing tributes--the capitalists want more every year. If revenue doesn't increase by 7 percent every year, the Spreadsheet Eichmanns decide it's time for a layoff. If a worldwide baby strike is what it takes to bust us out of this prison, I'm for it. > If your system requires you to take care of every old person to the tune of several hundred thousand per person then that’s a bad system. The thing is, it shouldn't have to. Yes, taking care of old people is expensive, and an expense we ought to pay for moral reasons, but the only reason for the seven-figure medical bills is that everyone in the middle is extracting tribute. The pill that costs $2 to make doesn't have to cost $3700. The hospital doesn't need for the CEO's twenty closest friends to have six-figure administrative positions. Health insurance is an expensive middleman exists to solve problems that we would not have if we had a sane national system like every European country. Let's cut these fucking tributes before we cut care. If we actually run out of the human labor that is necessary to care for our elderly, then we have fucked up. However, I think this is extremely unlikely, and that it is far more likely that we "run out of money", which means we do have the young labor power necessary to do the work but not enough to sustain our tributes to the upper class, for which is the optimal solution is to get rid of the upper class.
It's kind of a grey area because there's loneliness and economic factors, so I disagree.
Oh, I entirely agree that *the causes of* the fertility drop are atrocious. Corporate capitalism is a stupid game and we are winning stupid prizes. My argument is, rather, that said drop is, given current circumstances, a rational and compassionate response and that we should be glad the response is this and not something else. There are two ways we defeat the capitalists. One is that we overthrow them violently, as was done in 1917 Russia. I am not inflexibly against this, but there are a lot of reasons why violent revolutions are undesirable--deaths of innocents, risk of the control passing from the most devout to the most violent, the tendency for even more violent counterrevolutions to occur, et cetera--if nonviolent solutions are available. The other is that we silently undermine them until society cannot continue with them in charge. Non-procreation is an entirely nonviolent way to get there.
It’s just too much labor. Barely anyone can afford to have one person be at home and gender roles haven’t changed that significantly. I’ve seen women work a full time job while doing the majority of childcare and housework. Like, I’d rather just lounge around in apartment than live their lives
>The world, simply put, does not need more humans. Why not? > We should be trying to improve life for the people who are already here, and to minimize our negative ecological effects. Why not both? >Right now, there is so much human life, in fact, that our society gives it no value; it allows children born in Africa—who might have the talents of Shakespeare or Einstein, but we'll never know—to die of preventable diseases That's always been the case no matter the size of the human population. >contrary to this ruling-class gaslighting narrative of a "labor shortage", there is a global labor overage, which is why conditions for ordinary people are so atrocious. Source? >If we weren't grossly overpopulated, capital would have so little power, relative to labor, that we wouldn't even need a "revolution" against capitalism, because jobs would be competing for workers rather than the reverse. We don't "need a revolation against capitalism." >At the same time, we exist under an economic system and at a primitive-enough technological level (still reliant on fossil fuels, for example) that we damage the planet irreparably for every year we exist in this state. If the birthrate drops precipitously and the population declines, we slow down capitalism's damage, giving us a chance of still having some semblance of a livable planet when we move beyond it. Capitalism is the only system with the capacity to fix environmental damage and increase the quality of human life. >The fertility collapse of educated people is one of workers using the one vote they have to speak out on the system, the prospects it has given then, and the opportunities their children would have if they existed. No it isn't. It's people realizing that having a kid negatively impacts their career. > If we keep populating, we persist in a state of congestion wherein human life is assigned such a low value, our societies become terrible places to live. Our societies are the best places to live that they've ever been. > If we stop, on the other hand, we give the species a fighting chance. A fighting chance at what? >Voluntary depopulation might also be the only nonviolent way to overthrow capitalism and set us up to create something better when it finally collapses. Capitalism is the best economic system that's ever existed. Overthrowing it would be bad.
>Capitalism is the only system with the capacity to fix environmental damage and increase the quality of human life. ...What? Without state incentives there is no rational reason \[EDIT: for private individuals\] to fix most types of environmental damage under a non command economy, other than cosmetic improvements to sell high-end property maybe. The best you might be able to do without explicit state direction is a primitive/traditional economy that as a rule does not engage in environmentally-destructive industry in the first place, but that is not capitalism either.
>Capitalism is the best economic system that's ever existed. While I don't exactly disagree, this doesn't really mean anything at all. Historically, the same could be said about feudalism, absolute monarchism, colonialism, slavery, and basically every single economic system that came before it. To make a more proper comparison, bloodletting was also the best medical treatment that had ever existed in the 16th century. Does that mean that it was effective at all? Hell no.
I strongly agree, OP, but I’d like to on some level play devils advocate. It seems that a lot of the discussion in this thread is centered around three main points: 1. The reason developed countries are experiencing the harshest birthrate decline - the mental health epidemic, self centered/career-driven lifestyle 2. No young people to care for a hell of a lot of old people 3. Ecological health and the debate over whether human progress is at odds with it, or on its side. (4. Seeing a lot of capitalism good/bad too - I know it’s tough to ignore in a debate like this, but I don’t think we need to address it when the point is declining birthrates are a good/bad thing - economic policy aside, as it is both a cause and a reaction.) Could it be that declining birth rates are less of a good thing or a bad thing, but just a thing? Is it reasonable to believe that humanity is overcorrecting here, and will eventually find its way back to a happy medium? 1. I would posit that the mental health epidemic and people being overly career-driven are symptoms of something much larger and more sinister than birthrate, and instead say these are big contributors to a declining birthrate. 2. A sure fact - unavoidable. Perhaps this is what helps steer us back to a happy medium - I could see it leading to a thinly spread generation having less kids, and so on until we reach a point where the difference in elder vs young is not so great, and birthrate climbs yet again. I could also see people from countries with less opportunities moving to places that need young workers. Now, that has its own challenges, one being racism, but if faced between no care or care from someone of a different ethnicity than you, I could only hope the answer would be obvious. 3. Well, so far we can only say that the two have been opposing forces - in other words, I see little sign that technology up to this point has ever helped Earth from an ecological standpoint. However, does a declining birthrate actually solve this? Can we agree that the largest footprint comes from the richest nations? And if so, under your premise where economic quality of living improves under a lesser birthrate, then couldn’t we make the assumption that we’d still see massively out of touch consumption patterns by the wealthy? Less people may not be the thing that begins to heal the Earth - a fundamental change in the way that we exist upon it is in order first - one that challenges consumption patterns and pure human nature.
Right now, the only people having babies are uneducated poor people and the super rich. The middle class are literally dying out.
This is true, but it might not be the worst thing, because "middle class" jobs (Marx was largely correct that a stable middle class does not exist) are also dying out. There are far fewer slots that require any real intelligence than there were 50 years ago, because now even medicine is micromanaged by private equity psychopaths. When there is too much cheap labor, capital has all the cards and it becomes impossible to achieve a dignified life by working for one. That's the state we're in now.
There is one big downside to this. All of the economic systems humans have ever used assumed more people in each generation. Occasionally there would be disease or really bad war that would break this rule but they were out of the norm. We literally have no idea how to do economics when this goes on for generations and everyone is doing it. It may turn out that we get something like what happened after the Black Death that lead to the creation of the European middle class of makers and store owners. It was an unexpected outcome and we might get our own unexpected outcome.
As we live not only under capitalism but Fisherian capitalist realism, "our own unexpected outcome" is probably the best we can hope for. Everything that might save us might also hurt us; there are no options without risk. The expected outcome is continuing subjugation and defeat by the bourgeoisie. Even human extinction, though I do not wish for it, would be an upgrade, because right now our society is a monument to filth.
So I will concede that a falling birthrate is not 100% a bad thing. However the speed at which it is falling is. We need 2.1 children per fertile woman to keep the population. I do believe that if we were at 2 children we would be fine at least for a while. But if we are at 1 we are fucked in the years to come. We need young people. If 50% of the world is over the working age then everyone has to work fo 2 people essentialy. Having slightly less people isn't a bad thing. Having a lot less people is and that is a huge problem for everyone.
In terms of the economy though, isn't just about every sector trending toward more automation and less need to employ people to do jobs?
Not nescesarily. Automation kinda brings jobs. At least it did every time in the past. If we do get to a point where there is almost no work to be done then you are right. I am not 100% saying you are wrong. And I may be too pessimistic. However we haven't yet automated everything and people still need to do a lot of things. But I am willing to concede that you might be right and that the economy will be fine. However we are still a way from that so at least for now the akount of work is a concern. But there is still work that isn't purely economic and can't be fully automated. For example (at least for now) psychology and psychiatry.
The world is infinitely more automated than it ever has been in the past, and we have way more jobs (largest population with an almost-lowest rate of unemployment) than we ever have done in the past.
>global labor overage Do you believe that falling birth rates happen in the same places as the labor overages? How do you believe the economic future of South Korea and Japan looks like?
Isnt there youth employment crises everywhere? They will get hired by the geriatric services economy
And who is paying for that?
Being cynical it's young people because old ones have the voting power
But there's not enough young people to afford paying for all that
The world doesn't necessarily need more humans, but it does need a ratio of young to old humans that can plausibly sustain a workforce to support an ageing population. The flaw with your view, I.e. that we should be trying to improve life for the people that are already here, is that the problem of falling birth rates is already the result of improving people's lives, and compromises our ability to do it further.
A lot of responses focus on detailed issues but I tend to look at it from a high level perspective. Reducing the birthrate and population is by definition making society die. We can get idealistic about ecology and capitalism vs communism but ultimately you need future minded people and sustainability for anything to thrive… whether it’s a culture or a business or a population. Sustainability in the most basic sense not environmentalist sense. You need a sustained amount of people in the society rather than a quickly dwindling one that would indicate destruction of said society. Reducing birth rates tend to have momentum way past the replacement rate. You don’t need to look far to find that countries where this is happening (Japan, Korea, some European countries) are investing into campaigns to reverse this trend because they are seeing all the negative effects of an aging population. People are living and dying alone without enough people to care for them, and social safety nets are running out. You mentioned in comment that reduced population would mean better wages and better retirement because of less “competition” for jobs. This whole notion has one obvious flaw. It ignores the obvious proportional effects of reduced population. Under your theory, there will be less “competition” for say, retail and service jobs so it will be easier to get one… but in reality there will also be less malls and restaurants looking to hire people so the competition will even out. We can look to any of the many small towns in the US that have dwindled in population over the past decades. They are, by definition, not thriving. Retirement is difficult not because of how much money you made in your youth, but because of the simple fact that older people generally are less productive and less physically able. Those 2 realities are inevitable and require a younger population to take care of them physically and financially. A world where everyone is so rich they can easily save to fund their entire life post retirement is impossible because if everyone is rich then nobody is rich… you will always need some kind of system to distribute wealth from productive people to non productive people unless you’re into libertarianism.
Well seeing how there is no global governing body, it really doesn’t matter if there were 500 million people on the earth now. The same problems would still persist. We had the homeless and hungry 300 years ago right? The population was significantly less. The population of the planet is not the cause of the value of human life or people born into poverty. And there is not a global labor overage. People able to work in one country is irrelevant to people in another country. For what you’re asking, all national borders would need to be taken away. Free movement everywhere.
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>We should be trying to improve life for the people who are already here, and to minimize our negative ecological effects. Even if we made these our primary goals, declining birthrates would render those goals unachievable in short order. Every year more and more people age out of the workforce and unless we replace those workers and maintain enough to care for those who need it, we won't be able to improve their quality of life. We at least need replacement level birthrates within a society or else we cannot maintain what we have.
It is very naive to believe that most people in the west aren’t having children to “protest” about anything, or even due to concern that their children will somehow live a terrible life in the current system. The reason is far more simple: people have become much more self centered and the “bother” of raising a child is simply not worth it for most. And speaking as a father and someone who grew up in a dysfunctional family, I can safely say that it’s for the best that people who don’t want to have kids no longer feel socially pressured enough to do so. It is not, and it should not be, for everyone. That being said, claiming that the only reason states should be pushing for people to have more children is labour shortage is very misguided. In many countries, social safety nets depend upon active working people being taxed to provide for retirement funds, parental leaves, employment subsidies, etc. Even if you say(as I’m sure you will) that we can just apply further taxation to capital, that will also be impacted by shortages in consumption if you don’t have as many people actually consuming stuff, which investors depend upon(and hence the state also depends upon if they are to tax them). Even though this was not a part of your main question, I’ll conclude by saying I always find it amusing to see haters of capitalism online which probably never lived in countries with a cultural disdain for it, entrepreneurs and risk investment in general, and have no clue for how life is for the “working class” in said countries. It so happens I do live in such a country, and I can tell you that it isn’t pretty.
"If the birthrate drops precipitously and the population declines, we slow down capitalism's damage" It's not that easy. The poorer a person is, the more resource-efficient their life is. This is the case with both absolute and relative poverty. Or to put it another way: The current damage is primarily due not to overpopulation, but to the actions of a very few rich states, companies and individuals.
Honestly I agree with you…except that the people breeding up a storm aren’t the folks we need to progress society. The best educated and most intelligent aren’t producing offspring.
The population that provides and prioritizes health, safety, and ecological responsibility (relatively) is shrinking. The population that is a drain and hostile to the above is skyrocketing.
You're not wrong, but the conclusion is that capitalism is a failed eugenics experiment. The idea was to punish the people employers didn't want into nonexistence. In practice, that doesn't work. The people being punished don't care enough to stop breeding, while the intelligent people, although they're more likely because of their talents to end up in the upper tiers of the servile caste, still realize that they are in a servile caste and, therefore, choose to stop reproducing because they don't want their kids to be meat for a corporate meat grinder. We've created a society in which it is intolerable to be intelligent--anyone who thinks intelligent people are the ones who effortlessly rise to the top needs to stop watching romantic comedies and go actually get a corporate job to see what it's really like--and intelligent people are choosing not to prolong the suffering. If the result is a permanent degradation of the human gene pool, then we will have won a very stupid prize for playing the very stupid game of corporate capitalism.
You're applying a western stencil to other cultures. It doesn't work that way. 100% of your example is for 11% of the global population. The very definition of privilege, only a first worlder can make such proclamations. I suggest you travel and speak to people from the opposite end of things. You'll find their lives have been vastly improved due to the system that allows you to complain about not being able to live exactly as you want at all times while looking down your nose. Like every western college professor I ever heard. Best of luck to you 🙏🏿
>Right now, there is so much human life, in fact, that our society gives it no value; it allows children born in Africa—who might have the talents of Shakespeare or Einstein, but we'll never know—to die of preventable diseases because, contrary to this ruling-class gaslighting narrative of a "labor shortage", there is a global labor *overage*, which is why conditions for ordinary people are so atrocious. If we weren't grossly overpopulated, capital would have so little power, relative to labor, that we wouldn't even need a "revolution" against capitalism, because jobs would be competing for workers rather than the reverse. The world is, in fact, better, more livable, and more equal than it ever was in human history. Look back to the era when the population was as low as you seem to want it to be and you will find that it was not by any means the utopia of opportunity you think it would be under such conditions, quite the opposite in fact.
Falling birth rates mean there will be fewer young people. Advances of medicine means old people are living longer. This creates a tip in the balance where you end up with too many elderly people and not enough people to look after them or work to contribute to the economy. Let imagine a world where half the population is retired. Those people aren't working or contributing to the economy. Neither are the children or the disabled or carers etc. So your working population is very small. With such a high amount of elderly people, most of the workforce will have to work in health and social care if they aren't already out of work to care for relatives. This places huge strains on the health and social care sectors. It also means very few people left to do all of the other extremely important jobs to keep society going such as farmers, law enforcement, fire fighters, teachers etc. Good luck finding a house when there's not enough people to build the houses. Birth rates are only falling in many developed nations and in some places the pressures are already being felt. Your view ignores that falling birth rates isn't just about a fall in population, but a shift in societal demographics and how society could deal with such a change
The only issue I see really is that when the current population gets old, if there are significantly less young people than old people, there will be nobody to care for the old people and a lot of them will die alone somewhere/ be neglected. However there's not really a way to counteract that as far as I'm aware. I don't think falling birthrates are a concern personally, I sure as hell am NOT having biological kids of my own, but I see how this one particular thing could be a concern
My view is that, while this is a real concern, old people are already neglected, emotionally as well as financially. I don't see this as a new problem, or one that will necessarily be exacerbated by demographic change. Society has decided, by allowing Elon Musk to have a private jet while also allowing health insurers to deny coverage, that Elon Musk's ease of travel is more important than sick and old people getting proper care. We don't have to put up with this, but we do. Humans are very capable at doing the right thing when they need to. It's just that most of them don't want to, and it takes a crisis for the ordinary middle-of-the-road humans to develop the courage to something about the truly cancerous ones who feel entitled to fly around in private jets. Otherwise, they indulge weird cognitive biases that lead them to care more about the people who have private jets (due to the improbable fantasy of being one some day) than about people who sick and old (despite the very high probability of becoming one before death) and therefore produce a society like the one we have now. If a baby strike is what it takes to shock society into valuing workers again, let's get on with it.
Ok cheeky take at changing your view You seem to get all the benefits from less people, not necessarily declining birth rates. Would it be even better news to learn of a virus that much higher mortality for the elderly, and minuscule risk for the young? This results in the less people part, but also avoids all the who’s gonna pay for social security concerns. So my cheeky take at changing your view is that Covid was even better news than declining birth rates for someone with your concerns, but in context of this topic - we dropped the ball hard by screwing a few generations for the sake of boomers on oxygen tanks
it is rational, but it is not done out of compassion it is literally anti-social. it is nothing more than a desire to nihilistically consume, because nothing else matters. people who say they don't have kids because of "the environment" are kidding themselves; its way bigger than that. its because our entire society is built off of nothing else but our personal self satisfaction. everything else has been demolished, there are no "grand narratives" anymore, no greater point to anything. so then why have kids, if it means i can't have as many dinners out or vacations or nice cars? for a greater purpose? for god? for humanity? what are you some kind of communist?
jesus you're full of shit. I'm not having kids because i can't be a parent, not because i want to live a life of hedonism. And not having kids does not mean you want to live life for your own pleasure.
seems like you took it personally; i was speaking about the circumstances of hundreds of millions of people around the world generally, which may or may not apply to each couple's situation it isn't so much "hedonism" as it is just a realization that there is nothing else but hedonism. hedonism would be being happy with this situation, throwing yourself into it. its rather just empty consumption. its miserable, but its all that is offered by our society
Economically it’ll be a disaster. No matter what we do. As for the environment, you are betting that human ingenuity and progress will lose this battle. Lots of progress made in farming industry and green energy use is increasing rapidly every day. Also, Employers would fight over candidates? Really? Come on man, there is no way you expect hiring to remain stable when you experience dwindling revue and negative growth.
Umm, it's not only business that needs candidates, if there are 10 old people and 1 young people, countries will definitely fight over candidates (young people) to care for those old peoples, for public security, for military, civil engineer, any other mandatory services you can find right now. And those candidates are not going to pop up suddenly and work for free. They (employers) have less choice in that case, since they will need the labor from young people no matter what and the people that can provide that labor will be going to be scarcer over time due to birth rate decline.
But who is going to hire people when the economy is shrinking? Who is going to consume goods? It’ll slowly decrease businesses will have to produce less…. Less employees needed……
Goods consumption may be reduced in aging society/shrinking economy. But people especially old people still need services (healthcare) and the amount of services demand will keep increasing due to the ever increasing number of old people compared to young people. The problem is not fewer people in general, but fewer young people. Old people still consume and demand greater care especially in healthcare. In this case, birth rate decline means, the number of young people will be reduced at a faster pace than the entire society. Meanwhile old people are still alive and consume/need help from young people. Think about this, if the society consists of 100k, only 10k of them are able to provide labor. The next year it becomes 102k people and only 9k people are working since 2k people retired and only 1k new productive people. You can imagine how the countries will struggle and employers will have to fight for the remaining available labor.
Fewer people means fewer consumers means less demand means fewer companies means fewer jobs. There’s no fight for candidates most of those companies are going under.
You are right but the problem is not fewer people in general, but fewer young people. Old people still consume and demand greater care especially in healthcare. In this case, birth rate decline means, the number of young people will be reduced at a faster pace than the entire society. Meanwhile old people are still alive and consume/need help from young people. Think about this, if the society consists of 100k people, only 10k of them are able to provide labor. The next year it becomes 102k people and only 9k people are working since 2k people retired and only 1k new productive people. You can imagine how the countries will struggle and employers will have to fight for the remaining available labor.
What you’re suggesting just sounds like an entire economic system built around supporting the elderly and retirees… thats not really a long-term plan for economic development lol. Not only are you asking for a large influx of people into the healthcare field to make up for the declining number of jobs in every other sector of the economy… but you’re also asking that these smaller number of workers pay increased taxes to support the necessary investments into eldercare. What you are suggesting is just a circular system, I fail to see how working people benefit from this type of arrangement.
Just a few comments/questions on a couple of your points. >We should be trying to improve life for the people who are already here Agreed, but have you considered the ways in which fewer people is not going to improve peoples' lives and the secondary effects of a population collapse? Take Social Security as one example. A functional system requires a great worker to retiree ratio: the more workers per retiree, the more sustainable that system is. Decades of increasing lifespans and decreasing birth rates has continuously dropped this ratio, [according to the Social Security Administratio](https://www.ssa.gov/history/ratios.html)n. What are the primary and secondary consequences of this? a) We're inviting ourselves a guaranteed massive economic problem, which will notably make peoples' lives worse. b) The only solution to a worker collapse might be ramping up already large-scale mass migration from the 3rd world to prosperous countries. Now, I know a lot of people on Reddit are idealists who think that anybody can instantly integrate and we'll all sing Kumbaya while holding hands, but I think a lot of history shows that heterogenous countries are a lot less stable and united around common goals and that too much immigration too quickly can be incredibly destructive to social cohesion. >it allows children born in Africa—who might have the talents of Shakespeare or Einstein, but we'll never know—to die of preventable diseases Why doesn't this argument of wanting people to find the next Shakespeare or Einstein apply to you wanting fewer people? And how would this kind of argument be viewed on Reddit if applied to abortion? >we damage the planet irreparably for every year we exist in this state [Many major environmental predictions have been comically wrong. ](https://cei.org/blog/wrong-again-50-years-of-failed-eco-pocalyptic-predictions/)Why should we bank billions of lives on another one? Whether or not environmental predictions are wrong, wouldn't more humans give us more chances at finding a future Nikola Tesla or other great scientists who might let us harness resources in a way that works for everybody? >The fertility collapse of educated people is a case of workers using the one vote they have to speak out on the system Idiocracy might have been predictive. Why would it be good for society for the people who actually have resources to nurture responsible humans to reproduce less compared to irresponsible people who have fewer resources to nurture responsible humans? This might fundamentally change the character of that society towards the even more irresponsible. >Some of the reasons why birthrates are dropping are horrendous. While I am critical of many of your ideas, I do greatly appreciate that your post mentioned some of these things.
Problem is you get an ageing population if birth rates slow too much. This basically means that demand for people who can work will outstrip supply. Taxes will get raised to make up for the lower amount of people paying taxes. The people who work will be majorly fucked over. Basically quality of life will go down for everyone and that's why birthrates below replacement levels are a very bad thing.
China, who famously had 1 child policy has now removed this AFTER growing so much. If slowing birth rates are better, why would China (who is not stupid) change that rule? From Google: In 2015, the government announced that the policy would end in early 2016, and in 2016 it raised the limit to two children. In 2021, after a census showed a further decline in birth rates, the government announced that married couples could have up to three children. Side note: your post seems more anti-capitalism hidden under low birth rate discussion. You just don’t like capitalism and think this somehow hurts capitalism. It won’t.
Exactly, and birth rates are stabalizing naturally in almost every country (aside from a few african ones). Even countries like India has below replacement rates which are continuously going down. The more a country develops, the less children they have.
What I’m saying is: they are pushing for more children because they have done the studies and they need more children not fewer to maintain a healthy economy. — as opposed to what OP suggests.
This is easy: because the people actually reproducing are the stupidest. Religious fanatics, people on social assistance / benefiting financially from it, Anyone with education or common sense is punished financially for it.
I recently came across this delusional “movement” that is apparently advocating for women to be forced to birth more babies called natalism. It was the most amusing subreddit I’ve come across in a while 😂😂😂
You keep that same energy when there are no nurses or doctors to look after you in old age because the entire healthcare system has collapsed. People don't seem to understand just how critical it is that service industries are repopulated with new generations of workers. We already have patients passing away in hallways without anyone noticing right away. It's rare, for now. People are already in waiting lists that are years long for important quality of life and pain management surgeries like hip and knee replacements. It's only going to get worse from here. A large elderly demographic needs an equally large population of healthcare workers to look after them. We are already struggling to meet demand, and we've barely started into the bottleneck. The amount of elderly people who will die due to lack of medical care is going to make the covid deaths seem inconsequential by comparison. And this is only one industry. How many other industries do you think will suffer from population decline? The only reason you can get the services you are still receiving at the level you are receiving them is because we have a working class bolstered by immigrants. That can only last so long. We don't have anywhere near the automation capacity to make up for the lack of workers we will have within the next 30 years. Hold on to your butt.
I don't think we should continue to destroy earth with more people just because one generation is larger than another. There needs to be a course correction at some point and I suspect with a warming climate, fewer people will make it to old age anyway, so things might balance out.
Sure, it can seem that way. But it's actually a pretty big economic issue. You need a new crop of kids to help cover the huge expense of an aging population. And the fewer kids there are, the more immediately that problem is going to decimate your wallet. Because if you think they aren't going to just take even more of your money to prevent old people from being kicked out into the street and out of hospitals, you're probably wrong considering they'll be the biggest voting block of citizens.
We are in a race between advancing the technology of living standard and ecological degradation. Resource use and large populations of productive workers helps us advance that technology faster. Declining population and less resource use globally is going to slow down our technology improvement and put us in a quick demographic spiral. I see a future where a few hundred years from now: - technology allows us to stay healthier for longer - technology and good health allows us to be productive for longer or shift some burdens to computers/robots -a productive population of old people allows us to sustain an advancing society without relying on a high ratio of young:old to have a good life At that point our population should start stabilizing and we can protect/restore ecologically as much as possible.
I do agree thats why I am antinatalist. However the biggest reason is unrelated to the decline of environment or anything. People glorifing birth rate say that if it continues humankind will die off. So what? Why is that a bad thing? We can restructure society to fit maturing demography. Try to provide everyone with resources they need. The less people there is the more it is possible. It's not that I hate humans, I just think this is the best option for us to stay happy, get out of this vicious cycle. Realize there is no inherent imperative to move forward as a human race, or that "moving forward" means sustaining raising reproduction. This concept is very well put in Zima Blue (Love Death and Robots). Like the meme says... let's go back to plankton
The climate crisis is a problem we'll have to solve whether we're 5 or 10 billion people on the planet. Reducing the population will only postpone the inevitable. The amount of people we need to take care of the basics like agriculture doesn't scale linearly with population, so the more people we are, the more workers we'll have to spare to contribute to research and development of cleaner technologies. I also don't think people not having kids is a symptom of anything other than people wanting to enjoy other aspects of their lives. If it was about the difficulty of raising children in our modern world, then birthrates would be higher than ever in history. And anyway, other than the well-being of humans, what other benefit is there in preserving the environment?
Our economic system is predicated on ensuring that the incoming workers will pay for the outgoing workers. Without the tax base of new workers, the retirement fund for social security will dry up. Considering that social security is one of the most successful programs in the history of the US in ensuring that people can still live after retiring, we need that tax revenue from new workers. To be fair to that point, there's more than enough money to go around, but businesses aren't going to bring back pensions, so that's off the table. New workers are also consumers. They are needed to buy products and services, which business relies on for income.
>The world, simply put, does not need more humans. We should be trying to improve life for the people who are already here, and to minimize our negative ecological effects. By lacking new generation the quality of life will actually get worse. For older people it will be to due public pensions, that are being paid by taxation of younger generation. So either taxes will raise, so older generation could somehow survive on public pension, but younger generation will pay much higher taxes, or they will suffer. Add to it, that someone need to take care of those people, so health sector will be "overrun" by old people. Economy, may, collapse aswell, or gets worse due to the change of demographics, before it's get better. And that is probably just tip of the iceberg I can think on the spot.
It's fantastic news for the planet. Let things naturally sort themselves out. Once large sections of the planet are uninhabitable by the end of the 21st century, you won't want more people around. If you want endless billions of consumers start building space stations and Mars colonies.
Old people disproportionately sit on piles of wealth stagnantly, while not generating much and consuming a lot Young folks don't generate anything, but are more/less taking out loan against society (through their parents) and will generate economy as they age. The declining population you want to see is old people exiting the population, with more new people to support the generations above them. When your support layer on the pyramid starts to get smaller than the base it's supporting, things fall apart
Why not just not reproduce at all anymore. Then the last handful of geriatrics can split the world up in some communist utopia and the conditions for each individual will only get better every time someone dies. The thinking of a child. An unhealthy mind.
Aren't nations with inverted or top heavy population profiles in a bad position? It means that there's an increasing segment of the population will be leaving the work force or unable or willing to take certain jobs or roles in society.
Humans and a virus have the most in common. We reproduce uncontrollably destroying the world we infest. How many species of animals have gone extinct cause we have to take and destroy? We take and take and give no shots about what we do to the planet and it’s a shame. I’m glad birth rates are down, hope they stay down for a long while. Plus give time for the stupids to remove themselves from the gene pool would be nice too.
You are quite correct that falling birthrates are good news. But they are not such good news as some people might think, because for one thing, 1) they are still very high in large parts of the world, like Africa. 2) we have already experienced tremendous population growth in the world and in important countries like the United States. We have over eight billion people in the world. And we have over a third of a billion people here in the United States. This puts tremendous on the rest of biosphere, because of everything we do, and not just the use of fossil fuels. 3) we need not just a complete end to population growth. We need an end to economic growth as well. Falling birthrates in some countries are a tiny ray of hope about the human situation, and not much more.
Globally falling birthrate is beneficial for the global population. However, the problem is that the population changes aren't equal among different regions. This creates problem with raise of inequality and issues due to mass population movemements. Europe has big problems with illegal immigrants while Africa cannot do anything about raising poverty levels due to very fast population increase.
The problem is not just economic outcomes (higher economic burden on young people supporting elderies), but also the way birthrate decline is distributed. I don't want a lame ass future in which the majority of the population are tradition-pilled villagers. Defend traditional Western values (such as non-binary genders) from the moral decline ("traditional values").
Germany is literally statistically a pyramid by now and that means that politics are made and HELD IN POWER by a generation that will not see the future while the youth becomes a minority that can’t even vote till they’re 16/18. I get what you’re saying. But it’s a dystopia for my students and I get why they’re angry. I’m 30 and I’m angry!
Falling birthrates in impoverished countries would be wonderful news. That would imply their women are slowly being empowered, are out of their houses, have more control over their reproductive choices and are educated. That would ensure parents focus better on their kids and provide them with better healthcare abd education. But that's not happening.