Is this fair?
Is this sane?
What is normal?
Fortunately population numbers are returning to sane levels, and doing so without bloodshed, famine or diseases. What a fortune.
Oh no. Not the economy.
For years this demographic crisis has been coming (it was taught in schools in my country over 20 years ago!), yet we still harp on about overpopulation.
Population collapse is coming if this doesn’t change.
Thank god*
Does anybody think about the fact that every year on average 9-10 million people die every year from starvation and malnutrition related deaths. The vast majority of these numbers are children under 5 years old. The 9-10 million number was pre-covid. There was an uptick due to the supply chain issues. I think I read an article saying the number for 2021 was around 14 million. Again, mostly children.
It’s mostly kids in 3rd world Africa, middle east, India, etc.
We over here need to have more kids though. Because profits.
Idk I just think all this is dumb. Fuck capitalism and the system we have. It’s all fucked.
Good, lower OECD birth rates means member countries can open the borders more for immigrants looking for better prospects, better compensation and benefits for jobs in high cost of living areas, and less stupid hiring processes. Every labor shortage is a capital shortage. Also notice how CNN quotes executives and no labor leaders.
There’s no economic reason the nominal GDP of any country or the world in general has to continuously increase. The important metric is per capita production. As long as people get continuously more productive through innovation, standards of living will continue to increase.
At the national level, vying for long term economic power in the world, a higher and younger population is going to be a huge advantage very soon and countries should be trying to get as many immigrants in their borders as they can. But instead they are…going a different direction.
You say that, but when I’m more productive I’m inevitably much less happy. Work sucks.
Capitalist economy . Needs a lot of humans to keep its shit up. I guess a big change will come . The only help that can keep the moterfuckers doing their business is AI. It came to save them. Let’s see what happens. We humans are constantly adapting and correcting ourselves so many years already.
The world needs more babies.
Does it?
Or do we just need to embrace migrants?
“A reduction in the share of workers can lead to labor shortages, which may raise the bargaining power of employees and lift wages — all of which is ultimately inflationary,” Simona Paravani-Mellinghoff, managing director at BlackRock, wrote in an analysis last year.
“Have babies,” said the billionaire, “or else who am I going to exploit in the future?”
We need the opposite of more babies
Or, better yet, do we need to embrace the idea that infinite growth isn’t possible, and adopt economic systems that do not rely on it?
Many Boomers voted their progeny away when they put Reagan in office.
It is a basic math problem… they keep raising housing prices ain’t nobody going to have kids when 1500 in rent is due monthly
$1500 a month? I wish!
How is your rent so cheap?
Turns out that whole idea of women being the primary bearers of hundred of years of exploited reproductive labor might have had some weight to it, huh.
All that labor being redirected into “L’economie” means that, at base, you’ll have less children.
I really have no idea what these sentences mean. I feel like I’m having a stroke. Is it just me?
Women have been responsible for most of the domestic labor throughout history. Over the last 100 years or so, economies have changed so that women were first able to work outside of the home, then expected to work outside the home, and now need to work outside of the home. (E.g., a single-income household can’t pay the minimum bills in most places in the US.)
But doing labor outside the home means that labor can’t be done inside the home, because time is a finite resource; if you’re working 40 hours a week (plus commuting time), that’s 40 hours you don’t have for raising a family. That makes raising a family significantly more difficult.
The solution is to change the structure of the economy so that it’s entirely reasonably possible to raise a family on a single income without living in grinding poverty.
Yeah but how’s that supposed to maximise wealth extraction by our economic overlords?
Well first, they claim ownership over all women, then rent them out to men.
I want to say that’s just cynical sarcasm, but I’m not certain.
[Handmaid’s Tale intensifies]
Well, TBF it’s hard to maximize profit when you’re head is in a basket in front of the guillotine, sooooooooo I guess they need to figure shit out before then?
Billionaires are like an appendix. They don’t really do anything but as long as everything works normally no-one cares, but right now they’re causing a lot of pain and have to be removed. Society will function as normal just like your gut post appendectomy.
The best way you can help fight climate change is to not have children.
This statement always reminds me of the movie Idiocracy.
Fortunately, intelligence appears to have a wide range of genetic factors. Stupid parents can have quite intelligent children.
The documentary, at this point.
There are more people in the world than ever before and we have folks writing news stories telling us there’s a crisis building and that we need to have more kids?
They’re farming us like ranch animals.
I think our planet would be described as a free-range human labour farm, to anyone who was able to view it independently. Well, lots of it not so free-range. Its why they’re coming for reproductive freedom. They’re doing for the same reason a beef farmer wouldn’t give their cows reproductive freedom.
Look at long term trends, population is already dropping in East Asia and Europe
Sure, there might be more people in Nigeria, but they are not paying into your retirement
Yeah maybe this way of handling retirement doesn’t work? It’s clearly a pyramid scheme.
Obviously, but how do you fix it without getting more workers? No scheme would work without people doing work.
Society needs farmers and doctors. Like it or not, everything else is optional.
Where are you going to get new doctors if everyone in your society is 70 years old
Nurses are now optional? EMTs? Firefighters? Military personnel? Police?
I’m talking about necessary for the species to carry on existing. And yes I grew up in a place with no police, no military, no EMTs, no firefighters. We had a nurse though. If someone did something that would normally involve the police, it was settled by the parties involved. (If you got drunk and drove through someone’s fence, they’d show you up at your house with a roll of barbed wire and some fence posts and you’d have to fix it. Possibly also round up any escaped sheep)
Enjoy being conquered by another country if you don’t have a military. Sure, the species will survive, but you may not
Always were
Infinite growth requires infinite bodies to feed it.
Unfortunately I don’t have infinite fucks to give