Don't be fooled
Don't be fooled
231 comments
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People understand the concept of, "no infinite growth on a finite planet," but then refuse to accept that that holds true for us as well. The world population has more than doubled in my lifetime. Obviously we can't do that forever. Especially in the context of a climate crisis that is making less land livable over time. For completely practical reasons we are going to have to set up some kind of system that can function in equilibrium rather than requiring growth.
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This is true but people focus so hard on the population they miss the wider issue. Its not the number of people thats the issue right now, its the massively uneccesary amount of resources each person uses.
The world can accomodate a lot of people IF we shift the way we do things. If we all live like the world is an endless piggy bank, it wont work.
Without considering the way we live and the system we've built, people begin sliding into borderline eco-fascist ideas of population control because its an easy thing to understand and latch onto. But the situation is much more complicated than that.
So yes, there is a finite human population limit but that doesnt mean we've hit it or are even going to hit it.
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function in equilibrium rather than requiring growth.
Not only that, a system that can adapt to changes where the equilibrium might shift over time. We have a lot of work to do to undo the climate crisis, if we even can, and if not, we'll be living in a geologically different planet when we do.
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World population will reach a maximum of 9 million and then slowly decline as birth rates have fallen massively everywhere. However, in some countries the birth rate has fallen so much that it will be a huge problem. In those countries young people will have almost no peers while growing up, and in the context of Democracy old people will have a majority. See the Kurzgesagt video for what live will be like in South Korea: https://youtu.be/Ufmu1WD2TSk
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I said it before and I'll say it again ....
It's not about the quantity of life
It's about the quality of life
If you make the world a capitalistic hell hole where people are constantly worked to the bone without much reward and no time to enjoy their lives, then chances are, they won't be motivated or even healthy enough to want to have children. In the premodern wild, people had many children because they had time and they knew that conditions had the possibility of improving in the future. Sure, many of their children died but they knew that the ones who did survive would have a chance to survive if they worked hard enough because they knew their work would be rewarded.
In our current world .... you can work until your hands fall off and you won't be rewarded. More and more people are realizing that they don't want that for themselves so why should they do that to their unborn children?
The conditions for humanity are falling everywhere and people are so compassionate for their children that many of them feel like they don't want to bring their children into this hell hole we've created if 99.99% of everyone has no chance at a good life.
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Availability of education and basic needs is inversely proportional to birthrates.
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Availability of education and basic needs is inversely proportional to birthrates.
This is a lie. It's a lie promulgated by wealthy interests to fight against economic redistribution. You can only reach the conclusion that wealth has no impact on birth rate by making inappropriate comparisons between countries. But when you look within countries, the true relationship is revealed.
There is no relationship between wealth and number of kids....until you reach an income level of $300k or so. Then, there is a very strong correlation. It makes sense. In the US, that's about the level of income you need to really be insulated from the worst aspects of the US's economic system. At that point, you can afford to send your kids to a decent school. You don't have to worry about going bankrupt from health care costs. You can likely afford to have a parent stay home if necessary. At that income level, you're able to simply purchase the level of stability that would come with a proper social safety net. And once people have some stability and security, they start having kids.
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You're forgetting another portion of the calculation: amount of resources, and resource generation rate.
Take food for example. We have, and create, far more food than is needed. If that rate continues, we can theoretically keep pumping out people until the birth rates and food generation rates converge.
The actual problem, as it stands currently, is not the amount of resources, or how quickly we can create them: the problem is how they are distributed.
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Capitalism is all about using other people so that YOU can have an amazing quality of life. And even if you’re at the lower end of the economy in the US or Europe, your standard of living is propped up by third world labor, so really I strongly doubt that anyone here is in a position to say they’d be better off without capitalism. Most of the world, yes. Smartphone owning westerners: get real, colonizers.
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This assumes that said smartphones can only feasibly be created the way they currently are, and no other way. Can you genuinely not imagine minerals being mined, electronics assembled, by well paid workers?
Thats not to say the current absurd rate would still be sustainable in such conditions, but i don't think you can definitively say that losing capitalism would inevitably mean a decrease in living standards. A well managed transition to socialism could maintain much of our luxuries.
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It also takes knowing stopping births is possible and having the access to it. In lthe midst of the worst atrocities in human history we have still had sex. Slaves in the American south still had children in conditions that vastly outstrip anything else in modern capitalism. Native Americans still had children as disease killed 90% of their population. As long as there is enough food to keep survivors healthy enough to concieve and carry to term we have always had children. Because we always seek comfort from one another and sometimes that's sexual.
Now we have the opportunity to get that comfort without bringing in the child and we do.
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Unless you expect people to work until they drop dead it's a crisis regardless of the economic system, especially coupled with the increases in life expectancy. You have fewer and fewer people of working age who have to provide for and take care of more and more old people for longer and longer. Even if you eliminate profit motives, you're placing an outsized burden on younger generations.
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The notion that a decreasing population is a capitalism issue is straight childish. First-world demographics are going top heavy fast. And for all the cries that, "They just want more workers!", I say, yes, that would be the point.
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expect people to work until they drop dead
that's literally the direction we're going, regardless of birthrate. yes, it is a crisis. france rioted over this. we just shrugged and said meh, cross that bridge something something
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Yea but that cuts into corporate profits soooooo why not force a population of people to turn out babies like the good old days!
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You think raising kids is free? The cost to raise a child including college is more expensive than end of life care for elderly.
($27k/ year California plus $14k/year for public school for a total of $41k per year for ages 5-18. Then college which is even more expensive.) That's a minimum of $800k.
That compares to $150k of full medical care for last 3 years for elderly. Before that they are self sufficient and have minimal costs.
https://bmcpalliatcare.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12904-023-01197-2
And when elderly die, they free up resources for the next generation.
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Self sufficient? So youre saying they grow their own food and repair all their own homes?
It's a simple problem of not enough laborers to provide all the menial everyday ressources people want/need, while a growing number of people is retired and still consumes these things. We're technologically advanced enough that it won't cause us to starve, but fewer people making things when the same amount of people consumes things will always lead to lower quality of life if technology doesn't offset it by automating labor.
Capitalism is merely the cruelest system at this, since it will always fuck over the vulnerable first. Under capitalism it's a problem for old people and everyone whose elderly parents are still alive, under a fairer system it would equally affect everyone, but to a lesser degree.
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As technology improves to reduce workforce needed, it frees up more people to enter elder care workforce.
So things can still balance out.
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Ideally social security, Medicaid and Medicare should’ve been implemented as individual accounts. You get what you pay for with an extra amount being collected for disability insurance. Politically impractical but mathematically solves the problem of fluctuating population numbers.
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That wouldn't help. Retirement accounts are just as affected by population pyramids as state social welfare systems. They're just obfuscated.
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It's going to happen eventually whether you like it or not. The harm has already been done, do not delay the consequences.
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When the state pension was introduced in the UK back in the early 20th century it was set at about 2 years below average life expectancy. It just wasn't increased as life expectancy went up. I wouldn't be surprised if other countries are the same.
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How many people work in health care now? How many people are under/unemployed? How long will elderly live?
Do you see how this isn't a crisis for anyone but the rich?
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You did nothing to explain how it's not a crisis for the poor.
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You're looking at it purely from a present-day perspective. Just because the pool of available workers is large enough today to provide for everybody doesn't mean that it will be fifty years into the future. It's not about "infinite growth" it's about providing a consistent standard of living and a fair generational contract that doesn't place an undue burden on future generations.
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HEALTHCARE has a definitely shortage in alot of areas, nursing, doctors, and there so much fuckery going on with those industries too make it an unattractive option, Nursing you might be enticed to go as a traveling nurse, since they can make a High income earner. Others like CLS have limited amount of schools that will even teach for the certification it requires,(its a grad level certification) and thus the competition for these school is very high, and they all try to come to cali for it.
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Agree, when I hear billionaires complain about low birth rates I don't relate. Your problem, not mine. Maybe make it more affordable and less impactful on the planet, then it's more tolerable, but otherwise not really.
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maybe tell them to pay the trillions they have paid in the last few decade. and wasting money on the oversized budget of defense.
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This is deeply myopic. The problem is not low birth rates, but uneven demographics.
How does, let's say, marxism leninism deal with the problem of uneven demographic distribution? I've never heard of any even theoretical fixes from them for that.
https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/CHN/china/birth-rate -- do you think China doesn't view this as a problem?
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If I understand what you said, then it is still a problem caused by capitalism. Because we have the knowledge and technology to live comfortably with a lot less manpower then 300 years ago. And yea we can go into details, but the difference between an ox and a tractor is huuuuge.
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Because we have the knowledge and technology to live comfortably with a lot less manpower then 300 years ago
That's human nature, not capitalism. People get used to comforts. People don't like sharing what they see as theirs. This has nothing to do with private ownership of industrial equipment, and operating it for profit.
Sure, you can come up with a political / economic system where everything is divided up evenly. But, that goes against everything we know about human nature. People are selfish. They might be willing to share with their immediate family, or maybe even their clan / neighbourhood. But, people don't tend to sacrifice their comforts so that people on another continent who speak a different language can have a better life.
Look at pre-capitalist societies, were they full of egalitarianism and justice? You can't blame capitalism for human nature.
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It's not caused by capitalism but exacerbated by it. The ratio of workers to retirees in 1960 was 5.1 to 1, it's now 2.1 to 1. Sure if capital wasn't extracting excess value maybe we could be fine at 2.1 to 1 but I doubt we would be at .5 to 1. At some point it becomes an issue
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I've never heard of theoretical fixes either but proper Maxism-Leninism has a focus on central planning, doesn't it? They would certainly see it as a problem and surely consider potential solutions. At least one that acts in good faith of their main premise.
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Define "even"
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This is deeply myopic. The problem is not low birth rates, but uneven demographics.
At this point i just need to point out that earlier centuries had a very uneven demographic as well. In 1850, people typically had 6 kids on average, which means you had a lot of people too young to work and therefore not part of the workforce. Yet society thrived.
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They did handle that by ... Forcing kids to work. (Harshest example would be chimney sweepers)
Not like we don't do that now, forcing some kid to make our clothes so we cam buy it cheaper then f****** food.
Point is, "too young" population is not the issue.
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people too young to work
I think it's possible that you might confused how young that meant in 1850.
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How does Marxist leninism deal with this uniquely capitalist problem? I wonder how the factory owners under communism will make a profit under these conditions?
Silly
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It's more a uniquely hierarchical problem than a uniquely capitalist problem. Any hierarchy is made more powerful by having more people at the lower levels, so any long-lived hierarchical social system is likely to run itself into a population cliff at some point. So, as some forms of communism embrace hierarchy, some forms of communism are susceptible to this issue too.
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I think you're missing some essential point of basic economics if you think this problem doesn't affect communist societies. I specifically mean the problem of demographic imbalance, not the problem of "infinite growth" which communism does at least try to solve, and free-market capitalism doesn't actually view as a problem really.
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Well yes but no. Supporting this many old people is a genuine problem, no matter the economic system.
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Sure, a problem in the sense that it requires a solution. Capitalisms solution is infinite population growth via forced pregnancy. A non capitalist option is to simply use the very large amount of resources available to take care of the old folks. It's not profitable, but that's not the point.
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A non capitalist option is to simply use the very large amount of resources available to take care of the old folks. It’s not profitable, but that’s not the point.
Oh, the capitalists have very much figured out how to cash in on old folks. It's incredibly lucrative. I can't imagine them abandoning that gravy train until they've siphoned off all that filthy lucre that's settled out in the aging class.
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The clone army is right around the corner. Boy that's gonna be spicy.
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You can't just borrow or create money to fund things that are not profitable. Not saying infinite population growth is desirable but spending the large amount of resources on old folk does mean not spending it on the young folk = less money to education, health care and infrastructure. It's not fair to reduce real world problems to 'you just need to spend your money wiser'
Edit: just to clarify the comment I made above, it doesn't say we shouldn't care for retirerees, it is saying you can't keep the price we pay for supporting them the same if the size of the group if old people rises and the group of people who work to pay for it shrinks. An aging population is a burden to any population in any financial system just like a growing population is a boon. Again, that doesn't mean we shouldn't care for old people.
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It's really not a problem though. Half of the work done in society is completely pointless.
Anyone who has worked in a corporate office job can tell you just how much pointless overhead there is in big companies. Improvements in technology haven't resulted in a decrease in working hours, the standard of work has just been pointlessly increased to consume the same amount of labor hours. Look at computers and their introduction to the office. Things that would have been handled by a single page memo in 1970 are now handled by a 50 page report with glossy images and endless charts and graphics.
The key thing to realize is that companies are not rational. Their behavior is not driven by hard-edged perfectly rational profit and loss decisions. They're run by people, and people are social animals. And the people running the major companies are a fairly tight knit social group. They all talk with each other, they're all friends and intermarry with each other's families. They chase the same fads. Why do you think useless AI models have taken off so much? Historical aristocracies regularly became obsessed with fads. Our aristocracy is currently obsessed with LLMs.
This matters because this aristocratic group-think guides the actions of companies. Companies could have used computer technology to dramatically slash their labor costs. But that was unfashionable among the ownership class. Instead, it became fashionable to simply have the workers use those tools to create more elaborate reports and documentation. It's the modern office equivalent of a medieval lord pouring resources into a gilded palace and an elaborate retinue of performers. Executives get prestige from having highly paid people create pointless busy work, so that's what they do.
This pattern can be seen across many fields. Labor-saving devices haven't been used to reduce total human hours worked, they instead are used to expand the quantity of work done, usually pointlessly. Companies are not rational, and they do not make rational labor decisions.
This is why I am not in the slightest worried about an aging population. You state that too many old people is a genuine problem, no matter the economic system. But that is demonstrably FALSE! Too many old people is not a problem for a society that already employs the majority of its workforce in pointless bullshit jobs. The majority of our labor is pure performative waste; it exists primarily to stroke the egos of the aristocracy. We could cut the total hours worked in half without any decrease in the actual quality of goods and services available for people to enjoy.
Over the last several decades, companies have been able to get by while being incredibly lazy and inefficient. They've had the luxury of keeping excess headcount. Yes, it costs money, but prestige is more important than profit once you reach a certain level of wealth. As long as labor has been cheap, the owner class can afford to employ people in largely performative roles.
But with an aging population? The value of labor will skyrocket. Companies will find that they can't employ scores of people to fill pointless bullshit jobs. Companies that refuse to adapt will simply go bankrupt and be replaced by rationally-run operations.
How are we going to take care of a rapidly greying population? Simple. We'll just stop wasting most of our labor.
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Alternatively: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%84ttestupa
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I find this rhetorical framing unfair and even disingenuous as it suggests, absent clarification, that this is a universal scenario created by any system rather than a scenario that is only common under hierarchical systems that demand continual population growth, like capitalism.
You'd have been better to say "Any system would face problems if suddenly burdened by the consequences of capitalism."
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So wouldn't adding more make it worse?
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Infinite growth! Infinite population growth to feed the machine! More babies!
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In the long term, yes. Ideally your birth rate matches your death rate so you have stability in supporting the citizenry. But when your system expects the birth rate to exceed the death rate, even changing to equilibrium can be catastrophic.
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There is enough out there for everyone to live a happy life. We just have to realize it.
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We know, realizing it isn't the issue, it's (oversimplified) the greed of the ones who stand in the way of making it happen.
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I meant realize in the financial sense, as in “to make real”
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We’re too dumb and sabotaging of our intelligence because about 1/5 of humanity is too narcissistic to make it work. They won’t let let others thrive because to hold others back is easier than to strive for constant genuine improvement.
How do you propose to solve for this?
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1/5 can only stop the 4/5 if they don't fight back. So many people have been culturally taught to be run over - through distorted ideas of 'respect' 'politeness' 'order' and more.
They won't let us? No. We won't let them. Get up and defy them. In whatever style suits one best. Economic strikes, go off grid, protest with weapons, join a hacker organization, stop paying taxes, boycott the companies you hate... List goes on. Any one thing might feel like nothing, but together it is everything. Online there's so much hopeless content, it is easy to feel like no one else is mobilizing. But they are and they need every single one of us to take action. It's not important that we have the perfect strategy, it's important that we all defy together.
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I think some in this thread do not fully realize what some of the inherent problems of capitalism are and how they relate to this issue.
In a capitalist economy resources and labour are generally allocated in a way that maximizes profit. Profit is determined based on the prices of things and prices are determined by the exchange value of those things. That often results in the price of something being way higher than what it cost to make it. One result of this is that capitalist economies allocate enormous amount of resources and labour to things that don't have any beneficial value to society. For example, some of the most skilled labour in America is tasked with figuring out how to get as many people as possible to spend as much time as possible looking at anger-inducing content on their phones. This isn't contributing in any meaningful, positive way to solving society's known, difficult long term problems, like ageing population. In fact it likely does the opposite.
In contrast, a socialist economy allocates resources and labour according to society's needs, which are determined by some mix of economic planning and limited market dynamics. Prices of things are determined through these processes and generally represent how much labour goes into them. As a result, keeping people angry wouldn't get many skilled engineers allocated to. Instead these people's labour would for example be employed in automating the shit out of the vital sectors for society's long term well-being. Like automation in agriculture, healthcare and elder care. And then since labour isn't allocated or paid on the basis of profit, the socialist economy can keep labour employed in sectors where proven automation already exists and gradually ramp up automation as they retire. Alternatively it could let people retire earlier, or have them do other work if they want to, like community service, or art, or R&D, or childcare, etc. As a result a socialist economy has a better ability to sustain itself with less labour while taking care of its elderly, without enduring crises.
Worse, a capitalist economy has to go through the real material changes, actually allocating labour and resources, producing the things it would produce with its current configuration in order for it to figure out what to change and what to do next. Thus we're faced with the horror of all these bad decisions that we currently see basically locked-in and consuming vast resources and labour until they become unprofitable or resources or labour are exhausted. Which means we're very likely to run into crises before the system adjusts to the new realities of diminished labour force. And then we'd likely (as we already are) rush into solving that by importing labour, which is going to get us into social instability due to racism, and we know how that goes. There are plenty current examples to go around. Meanwhile an economy that can do planning can model ahead of time what different future economic configurations would look like, make projections, choose a desired one and have resources and labour allocated on solutions today, thus increase the chances of avoiding acute socioeconomic crises or minimize their scale.
I hope this helps understanding the premise.
And for today's misallocation of resources in capitalism I give you - https://sh.itjust.works/comment/18820691.
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In contrast, a socialist economy allocates resources and labour according to society's needs, which are determined by some mix of economic planning and limited market dynamics.
The only problem being, that while nice in theory, socialist economies never actually did that in practice. Since humanity has never figured out, how to actually do economic planning in some centralized or semi-centralized way without being very inefficient and corrupt. I used to think AI could do that one day, but I guess that was too optimistic...
It's easy to see capitalism is terrible. It's hard to see a better system, that could replace it.
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I don't think that's true.
Central planning ran the USSR and its satellites for some 40-70 years. They didn't even have computes for the majority of this period and many of these economies experienced high rates of growth. If I remember correctly, the USSR speedran economic development so that the GDP per cap of the USSR increased 10 times between the beginning and the end of the experiment. The US grew about 3 times during the same period while being the main world hegemon, profiting from the vast majority of the world. Of course there were problems, like the famines in the 30s, but they didn't repeat post-WWII. It's not like capitalism hasn't caused famines around the world either. So despite the standard criticism, I don't think planning did poorly overall.
China is also demonstrating how long term central economic planning allows to build an economy efficiently, with a long term focus and avoiding most crises capitalist economies experience on regular basis. They're clearly leading in development of solutions to climate change in a way that is above and beyond any other economy, in solar, wind, battery and EV production. Just earlier this month we saw their emissions fall despite higher electricity usage for the first time. And they're powering a lot of everyone else's renewables transition. Then on the ageing front, they're already doing a lot of manufacturing automation. I read they're also doing farming automation now. Apparently DJI's other job is spraying fleets for example. I don't know much about healthcare and elder care but I imagine they're either working on reducing labour needs or planning on it. So yeah, while we're afraid of automation because we know we'll be left jobless and/or deskilled by the capital owners (even if it eventually leads to a crisis), them socialist fkers don't have that problem. The more they automate, the less population they need to maintain and grow their standard living, the cheaper they can manufacture what they make, the easier the ageing population problem becomes. Given how many universities they're opening each year, growing the highly skilled research labour share, I think they're only going to accelerate these trends.
One more thing about planning - the largest capitalist corporations that deal with actual physical production and large supply chains already do the type of planning that's been done in past and present socialist states. In fact it's probably larger and more complex than some whole countries. A common example is Walmart. You'll find little market forces within its operation. In fact companies like this, that have complex enough products and/or supply chains do everything they can to isolate themselves from the free market in order to decrease uncertainty, therefore increase the likelihood of successfully producing and delivering the product, and of course maximize their profits. If you consider how every major sector of the economy is getting consolidated through competition into a monopoly or oligopoly, and similar economic planning process goes on in most of those, you could perhaps see how capitalism itself trends towards central planning. Of course for profit maximization and not social benefit.
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Since humanity has never figured out, how to actually do economic planning in some centralized or semi-centralized way without being very inefficient and corrupt. I used to think AI could do that one day, but I guess that was too optimistic…
The big national retailers already operate as central planners.
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Wish I could upvote your comment more than once. Clear as it can be. 👌🏼
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I tried making it as concise as possible while preserving the main bits needed to follow the logical arguments and using as little jargon as possible. I'm glad you appreciate it! ☺️
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Like, they are bad for societies though. Not just in terms of keeping them around but also in terms of demographic makeup, no? Children are an important part of the social fabric. There is a point at which the old outnumbering the young does bevome a bad thing.
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Yes, but our consumer society isn't raising the alarm for those reasons (for the most part)
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Why though? Those statements might or might not be true, but they’re totally unqualified.
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My mind goes to this video.
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It usually always translates to "We really need more poor and working class labor so pump out more wage slaves." We could be a way better society if we move past enriching billionaires and the rich.
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It's a crisis for who will support you in your old age. Capitalism or no capitalism, if you want to keep eating after you stop working, either you store enough literal food in your barn, or somebody else works so you eat.
Traditionally, that's family: your children. Capital/investments/savings, or socialised care, spreads that around the State a bit more (or round the local or global community). But when there are few children and many adults, later there are few working people and many retirees wanting to enjoy life - and you're one of the retirees.
It's a "problem for capitalism" because so many people have invested in capitalism for their retirement, and that could be upended. And because actually-small investments were made, on the basis that constant economic growth means lots will be returned when the time comes.
But it's a "problem for humanity" - all the people who don't have children to care for them and rely on money and financial investments - which both just represent a stake in someone else's work - for the future.
I've written myself into a corner a bit here. Few working adults to many retirees is always going to be difficult, no matter your economic/political system. But logically from my, simplified, argument, the last two paragraphs beckon a third. To recap,
- Retirement funds: a stake in "Capitalism", to provide for your retirement based on broad economic growth
- Money: a stake in the total economy, to provide from people's work. Then:
- A stake in the community, based on being a member of the community. E.g. a citizen - then this is socialism. If there are enough working adults - or bread in the barn - to provide for all the elderly, then all the elderly (you included) are provided for, regardless of whether they have children or saved money or made investments.
But still, if there isn't enough for everyone, everyone suffers. And it's rare to find a community that really wants to care for its elders well, putting in the effort for them rather than people spending on themselves, without outsourcing to 'capitalism' and economic growth.
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Your problem is twofold.
- We need people working services, among which elderly care is going to be big, and producing all the stuff the existing people need.
- You keep working with money. Money is a great idea for a society where everyone is supposed to be productive. But not so great beyond that. When you inevitably move to a society where loads of people are not productive because of age and automation, money becomes an obstacle rather than an asset.
Given the limited amount of people needed to provide services and produce with the current and near future level of automation the only problem is money. Because money means that only people who earn it have rights to goods and services.
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They are kind of a crisis for pensions, mind. The whole idea of a state pension is that for every worker there are approximately two more paying in to cover the costs of the pensions. Every generation is paying the pensions of the previous generation. Obviously it's actually less than two because of tax brackets and the fact that people die early, but on the whole, it's roughly two people.
If population declines, well you're gonna have to re-think your pensions and social care and find the money and/or labour somehow.
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Billionaires are always welcome to pay their fair share of the tax burden by paying their employees a wage they can live on. Higher wages means more taxable income. Their current policy of, "privatize the profits and socialize the risks" benefits no one but themselves.
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Oh no, not a reform of the ponzi scheme known as the pension system, the only solution is that we forcibly breed humans so that we have someone to pay taxes.
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It's a problem that there will be fewer people in the generation below ours to support our generation in our dotage. This problem is the same regardless of your economic model. Fewer people in the working pool and more people sick and elderly is a bad time.
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There's currently 5 million care workers in the US, at a total population of 332 million. Source
That means that even if the birth rates drop really low and we only have 50 million workers in the next generation, it will still be enough to care for the elderly.
However, it might not be enough to fill the last bullshit workplace some company makes up to make yet another dollar into the pockets of the rich.
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Old people, even those who rely on care workers directly, also rely on a lot of other types of workers. They need to eat, so some portion of the farmers, agricultural processors, logistics workers, cooks, dishwashers, etc. will need to continue to support the industries that feed people. Then the industries that feed people also rely on their own supply chains: equipment manufacturers and maintainers, electricity and energy, etc.
Simply being alive relies on the work of others. Broadly speaking, we expect there to be a ratio of workers to the broader population, including those who are not working: children, students, disabled, elderly retirees, etc. If the workers stop working, the non-workers won't be able to live.
If there's a one-person society, they basically will always need to work at least some to stay alive. If they're incapacitated from age or injury, that might mean death, no matter how much they've accumulated up to that point.
So no, I don't think this is a uniquely capitalist problem. Non-capitalist societies have dealt with population collapse before, but those tend to impose real danger to the non-working elderly, and not all of them survive the turmoil.
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That's the great part the current youth won't get to be sick and elderly. We'll just be sick and dead.
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And what causes fewer younger people?
Couples not having children.
What causes couples not to have children?
Well, beyond simply not wanting them: economic insecurity. A more equitable economic system would remove that barrier.
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The majority of the hours worked in the US economy are pure pointless waste. The waste rate is so high because labor is cheap. With more expensive labor, companies will have to use it more responsibly.
If you think companies use labor efficiently, you have clearly never worked in a big corporate office.
Solving the labor crisis of aging is trivially simple. The market will simply force companies to be more efficient with labor. And as labor earns higher wages, workers will pay higher payroll taxes and be able to keep the pension system running.
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Birthstriking is the biggest middle finger one can possibly give to capitalism and to the corrupt establishment that enforces it through violence. It is the strongest action available to the average person, a direct vote against the future that we are headed towards.
They know this, which is why they are freaking out with tons of propaganda, attacks on education, and erosion of women's rights.
Birth rates below replacement level do present some actual challenges to society. But instead of trying to actually address these issues, they are going for the band-aid of increasing birth rates.
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They only care about birth rate so that labor is devalued.
Historians argue that one of the contributing factor to the end of feudalism was the black death, because the laborers left had more bargaining power then before over the nobles/clergy to make demands like tenancy, humanistic values etc.
But the moment where AI is able to replace whole industries is when these sob stories will vanish, and in good conscience, who can have a kid when those are their prospects?
This isn't like the industrial revolution where people were just upskilled and shifted into other domains, there's only so many hospitality and service oriented jobs which can support the labor force writ large.
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In so many of the contrarian responses I'm seeing, I'm reminded of Fisher:
it's easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.
That is to say that so many cannot escape the capitalist framework of productive workers supporting the elderly. As though that's the only way society can possibly be organized.
Retirees are not seen as deserving of their reward, but rather a drain on productive labor. It's no wonder that there is so little sympathy for the destitute and homeless when those who've "earned" their leisure are still known as parasites.
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How do you imagine a world of caring for those who cannot care for themselves without people to care for them?
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AI powered spank bots
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We have the people and resources to care for the old.
Nobody wants to care for the old because it doesn't reward you with enough money to live off of.
I think a better question is how will we care for the old when we force people to work bullshit jobs that aren't as important just so they can have a life worth living?
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Economies become ever more productive with new technology. Currently that surplus goes to raising standards of living, primarily the standard of living of the wealthy. The surplus productivity of new technology can instead be directed at providing the same standard of living, but at reduced labor participation rates. So maybe we stop making our homes and vehicles ever-larger. Oh well. We'll survive and thrive just fine. I would much rather have that than any attempts to coerce people into having children.
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With the introduction of automation every decade (currently AI is the big one), unemployment rates will go up so we don't even need as many working. Our capitalist brains just can't fathom "handing out" extra resources.
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Every automation brought more work, rather than less. Why? Because profit. If the boss owner can get more out of less people, they will fire the unneeded workers, bring prices down and force the competition to either follow or close down
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That's not exactly true though. With excess, we've increased the needs and wants of individuals and scaled production to match. We could easily provide the same amount as before with less people, but every generation is leveraging the growth of the previous generation. Once we don't grow in one generation, we'll plateau and we won't be ready for it. It'll be the social version of an economic recession.
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Capitalism is fine with it actually.
The issue is that there will be too many old people and not enough young people to support them.
But old people have most of the money. So, lots of money will still be spent. Capitalism will be fine. Sure, some old people will have no money and bankrupt their children. But capitalism does not care about that.
It would have been a bigger problem before AI and robotics. But capitalism will shrink the workforce faster than birth rates.
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You can’t bankrupt your children lmaoo just toss em in the wood chipper, or hand them over to the state. They won’t be leaving much behind but you can’t bankrupt your kids just by existing
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Actually would be nice if worker pop drops so hard the value of workers goes up.
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In Europe after the Black Plague the value of peasants increased significantly contributing to social and economic reforms. Lower birth rates can accomplish the same feat with less suffering.
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The average age at death was much-much lower.
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That's what im thinking they are really afraid of.
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capitalism: fuck the world up and then panic when people give up on life
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"you're not producing enough capital batteries"
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that is why countries wont even dare discuss why its occuring instead trying to low effort coerce people into having more children.
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Low birth rates are problematic to carcinogenic ideologies.
Positioning the increase in population as a core tenet for a system condemns it to resource exhaustion.
I’m all for providing the option to ‘procreate’ where it’s appropriate and non-coercive, but demanding it as a requirement for acceptable incorporation into society should always be disparaged and ridiculed.
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Yeah depends on what scale you’re looking at. Worldwide it’s still poor, religious conservative people who still have lots of children. If the scales tip far enough I could mean humanity will regress for several generations because these religious conservative people have become the majority and will put fascists and dictators into power.
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You mean... Like the ones the US put into power last year?
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Trap people in a work - consume - die paradigm
People refuse to bring new life into the hellscape you created
Cry about it in your propaganda channels
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OK - hear me out.
https://muppet.fandom.com/wiki/Hurling_Day
Yeah, capitalism sucks - but the greying population is an issue all the younger gens have to deal with. Once again the problem is boomers (not their fault for being born though). Thankfully, Jim Henson gave us a solution.
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Holy crap I forgot about this. Reminds me of Midsommer. I think I also read about this ritual in "The Golden Bough.", but it's been awhile.
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no. It would take a far larger imbalance in the population for it to be truly unmanageable. The real danger is not to the labor we can do, but the security of the empire we may live in. Other empires might exploit the lack of fighting age citizens, and this isn't a fabricated threat. Invasion from more "efficient" empire is a constant consideration that requires a sizable younger population to guard against.
However, this isn't a problem inherent to every society that could ever exist, only constantly reinforced by the desires of systems and people to conquer and dominate.
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And even more specifically, hyper consumerism-driven, wasteful capitalism more than just capitalism itself.
Well regulated and not utterly greed-driven capitalism that gets fairly taxed to support the societies infrastructure that it feeds off is not so bad. If that would ever happen.
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If that would ever happen.
Well, you see, the thing about capitalism is it empowers exactly the people who don't want that to happen. Consumerism-driven, wasteful capitalism is the in-built trend of capitalism itself, not an unfortunate variant - even government regulation doesn't solve these problems.
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I don’t think “not so bad” is the best phrase for that. Not as bad, certainly, but I have a difficult time saying “not so bad” about any kind of capitalism that isn’t already transforming into something like market socialism.
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True, not AS bad would have been a better wording.
Unfortunately I firmly believe that any form of society is always going to be at the whim of sociopaths getting into power who will fuck up whatever the system is in place. it's one of the defining scourges of our species, we are easily led like sheep.
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It seems to be a totally naturally occurring phenomenon happening everywhere. We're developing more as a species and having less offspring as a result. Its predicted that we will hit our planets population maximum this century. Its entirely possible that the human species will never have more then 10 billion people on the planet at once. Thats our high score.
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That depends, really. I'm sorry, but these anti capitalism memes always show such over simplified view of the world, this is not how things work.
Take South Korea, for example. The way they are going right now, 50 years from now it might not even exist anymore. Granted, the underlying causes there for the low birth rates have a lot to do with uncontrolled capitalism, but communism won't save the country from this problem.
You still have a shrinking work force to do the required work, you still have a relatively expanding section of elders that won't work anymore but requires care instead, being an extra "burden" on the country. Less people will have to do more work over time and it causes a huge list of issues that communism really isn't going to solve.
The actual solution for South krea would be in tightening laws on their capitalist system, allowing people more time to have children in the first place. Then they need immigrants, and probably quite a few of them. Like Japan, South Korea is rather homogeneous, they're in for a surprise, I guess.
Either way, just posting these "but of course communism will solve this, communism solves everything" memes is so naive it's just child level dumb.
Communism hasn't worked well anywhere, how about some pragmatism and we start hard limiting capitalism instead, which we know does work
Birth rates are so low
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The low birth rates aren't just rampant capitalism though; it's also SK women having a choice to not get married and have children, combined with a culture that's almost rabidly misogynistic. If I were a Korean woman, I absolutely would not want to get hitched to a Korean man and have children with him, because I know that it would be very unlikely that I'd treated like a real person or an equal partner. But the culture--much like Japan--seems to prize people that put in horrifically long hours, and even if you fix the cultural misogyny, you're still stuck with not having much time to spend with your partner.
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Is it even a crisis for capitalism? Modern day capitalism seeks to eliminate workers, the ideal for the capitalist is to make a factory full of robots with like 10 employees that manage and service them. As factory work dies the population stabilizes (it doesn't shrink, it just stops going up year over year) and the remaining population performs service jobs that can't be performed by AI/Robots or a select bit of high paying factory jobs where robots cannot yet perform the factory task.
In an even more dystopian outlook the capitalists don't even want people for service, they likely would want robot and AI service (waiters, barbers, etc) in the long game to eliminate the need for serfs.
At the end of the day the cry about population collapse and declining birthrates only makes sense when you add a desired ethnicity before the term. Example [White] birth rates or [White] population collapse. Elon Musk isn't worried about the birth rate of Japanese or South Koreans. This whole thing is about racist views on world ethnicity.
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Every person born is another potential consumer for [PRODUCT]
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Yeah, but it's cyclical. You need people to buy product, but people need money to buy product. Yeah, the ultra wealthy will have money, but you can get more money from 10 million people buying something for $10 than from 10 people buying something for $100,000.
If you get rid of the jobs then people don't have money so who will buy [PRODUCT]?
You could have 10 trillion people on the earth, but if you only have 3 billion jobs the issue isn't population. You could argue that 3 billion jobs support up to 15 billion people, but the issue still isn't the population at that point, it's the number of jobs.
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Captialism can cause low birth rate, but no economic system can survive the decimation of the prime-aged working class.
Even china's seeing low birth rates, but they have a bit more padding.
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china is already freaking out over it, trying to do things to "make people have sex more"/
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Their population is poised to half by 2100 leaving them with something like 80 or 90% less young people.
South Korea's set to implode by then. 96% less young people.
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And a medium term crisis for elderly care
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What do we do about the coming unemployment crisis?
If AI replaces a lot of workers, we'll have too many people in the country. There is no healthy way to rapidly decrease the number of people in the country. A good leader thinks ahead and people stop having kids before the unemployment crisis fully hits.
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If AI replaces a lot of workers, we’ll have too many people in the country.
Unless you're in China or India, you can look at those two countries to see just how high population can get without destroying a country. Literally in the billions. The bigger problem is how the country organises, not just the number of people. I'm guessing you can look outside for a few minutes or hours and notice plenty of jobs which could use people doing them, the problem is our political-economic system forces people to do what's profitable, instead of what actually needs to be done. And when the people with enough money to employ people (i.e. to decide what work we do) are stingy parasites, we get this mass unemployment. In fact, some of that unemployment is intentional.
But, with all that said, you're absolutely correct that we also need to consider the current situation and cope with that, and that a good government needs to try and manage that. And they're not.
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I’ll believe it when I see it. Someone has to maintain the buildings and people as they age. Without people you don’t have a society. Norms break down, culture breaks down and then some other group will come in to fill the void.
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We've seen it over and over throughout history and it's always been positive. The Black plague. Most recently WW2 depopulated the West of the most able bodied workers. The result wasn't a collapse but a boom. Those remaining had cheap housing and were paid more for their labor because there were fewer workers.
When population declines enough that everyone has resources, population will go back up again.
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Since our economic systems are built to be a pyramid scheme it’ll hurt back for a generation or two but the ecological benefits will quickly outweigh the economic issues.
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That's the same logic Trump uses for the tariffs
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You lost me at Trump using logic.
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Hence the agenda of the current American regime. Outlaw birth control. Eliminate public education. Health care will be too expensive for most workers. And over it all, evangelical Christianity keeps a poorly educated workforce in line. So you end up with a working class who breed fast, die young, and have no concept that life could be any other way.
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Sounds catchy, but I'm not sure this is really true. Capitalism is about owning things, not selling things.
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Support life extension, then both are happy.
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The word "for" does a lot of heavy lifting in there.
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My condo building just got rid of the company that meters our water. After years of this we could finally break the contract.
My water bill usage was something like $15/mo and they had an admin fee of $13/mo. In a building of like 150 apartments, those guys were raking in like $2k a month from us for keeping their automated shit plugged in.
The managers said they would just stop metering and our monthly fees would pay the bill. After a year, they would adjust our monthly rates to balance it out.
They never had to balance it out - that’s how little the overall water usage cost was.
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Humans are the most overabundant resource on the planet...if capitalism actually functioned, the system wouldn't incentivize creating more.
But the current economic system isn't even true capitalism...it's optimized wage enslavement paired with a caste system. Keeping labor pools well stocked depresses the value of replacing individual units...all they're figuring out now is how best to trim maintenance costs.
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So phuck but use a condom.
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Lots of gay sex. Lots and lots. Daylight's burning folks.
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Not the folks who live in Forks. It’s always cloudy there.
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But remember the lube.... Free lube CMC a cake ingredient. It makes a huge amount of clear gel when mixed with water. Like a spoon of it will Make a cup of gel.
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I’m proud to do my part. 🏳️🌈🫡
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I don't think a socialist revolution (or any other sudden overthrow of capitalism) can save South Korea: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ufmu1WD2TSk
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The so-called birthrate crisis is manufactured by morons like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk who clearly didn't pay attention in science class and didn't learn about logistic population growth https://www.britannica.com/science/population-ecology/Logistic-population-growth and those who see a line going down and assume it will keep going down at the same rate forever.
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It’s not just capitalism though, it’s innovation and the arts. Our development as a species is partly contingent on population, on more chances of finding that genius, more excess capacity that can be devoted to things not obviously profitable. I disagree with the open endedness of your statement, the rate of change.
Given
- we can’t keep growing
- we’re probably beyond sustainable capacity for this planet
I’ll agree with
- we need to slow and stop population growth
- shrinking population would be better
But disagree
- the rate of drop is important - we want to reduce harm, societal stress, conflict
- we want to plateau at some population well into the billions but less than today
Most importantly, fertility trends look like we’re heading for a fairly steep drop in population as the current generations age out and pass. We are heading toward disruption, societal stress, conflict.
It’s unclear how to stabilize the birth rate for that lower plateau, since we’re mature enough to not go back to oppressing women (I hope), but clearly we’re disincenting children and will quite likely regret that in a generation or two, for most developed countries. For the long term future of humanity and our society, we need to start making tweaks now, when they’re just tweaks. Start making it easier to have children. Start helping parents more. Start making it easier to grow up. Look after our future as a species rather than freeload off the personal choices of individuals.
I do compare it with our treatment of climate change. We failed to make small changes when small changes would have been sufficient. The longer we wait, the bigger, more disruptive, more expensive the changes will need to be. We’re bad at looking ahead and setting longe term priorities but need to get better fast
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We need financial and quality of life incentives to pump the gas and brakes on babies.
We need to match the death rate with the birth rate and move that disparity super slowly.
Too many geriatrics, worker class gets f'd
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Capitalism can exist on a gold standard, or a barter system of goods, which if we were on those systems then a shrinking population would do nothing inherently negative.
The thing that breaks with a declining birth rate is monetary policy, which requires an ever growing money supply because we've designed a 2% inflation target, which means growing consumption via debt monetization. The reason for 2% inflation is to monetize our debt, in order to force people onto the risk curve for economic growth; we grow the money supply about 6% a year to achieve 2% inflation due to technological advances and a broken CPI index.
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No, capitalism always wins and works.
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Births are not a problem we aren't "too many" we not overpopulated we are destroying resources without thinking how they get back into nature. Thia is not a thanos solution if we are half as many but still doing the same shit nothing will change.
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