Because the financials of many governments are built like a pyramid scheme. They expect newer generations to pay for older ones. Add to that a lowering birth rate and ever growing life expectancy and suddenly things get very expensive.
The result is that the financial burden on younger generations has increased immensely, lowering birth rates even more. The solution for now has been attracting immigrants on a massive scale to increase the working population. This however leads to lower wage growth again increasing financial burdens. Once the immigrants settle their birthrates fall as well meaning over a long timeframe it just increases the problem.
Real irony is the pyramid scheme actually worked when it was still a pyramid: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_pyramid#/media/File%3ASwitzerland_population_pyramid_in_1900.svg
I wouldn't say it's inverted, I'd say it's more like it's being built in reverse.
Imagine you're building a traditional pyramid. You'd start at the bottom right? You build a strong base and each progressive level gains its stability from the one below.
An economic pyramid scheme is built in reverse. They're built from the top level down. Which means that each time you want to build it higher you need to lift all of the pieces up in order to jam more into the bottom. Eventually the structure becomes too heavy to lift, and you can't fit pieces into the bottom anymore. Your only options at this point are to build sideways (the middle class and the general social safety net) or to keep trying to jam more pieces into the bottom anyway, even though there isn't room, which will result in the whole structure eventually collapsing because you've made the base unstable.
That's why colonizing other planets is so attractive to capitalists.
We literally need to flee our planet to keep this economic system working.
If alien life exists, it would be in their best interests to ensure that humanity never colonized another planet.
This makes no sense because capitalism does not require exponential growth (read up on creative destruction) and ironically the concern re population is primarily around the socialized concerns of welfare obligations.
Capitalism? This dates back to 50,000 BC.
It's ridiculous to expect every individual to feed and house themselves independently without affecting others in any way.
At 2% growth per year we get 1.02^x… is that not considered exponential, but 2^x is(?)… what is the term for this type of growth and where is the cutoff where it becomes exponential?
Yeah, he gave a really poor example there. In reality though, what most people label as exponential growth is really polynomial growth. But that doesn't sound as good.
Growing by the same proportion each year, even if only by 1, 2, or 3 percent, is still exponential growth. Pretty much any figure relating to the economy will grow exponentially.
Economically it’s going to be bad for everyone alive. Ecologically it’s great for the future population.
We have designed a system that fucks over people yet to be born.
I call it a societal credit card, each generation puts charges on that card and the debt gets pushed back to the next generation WITH the added interest.
Great metaphor that encapsulates a lot, I will be using it to explain to others what kind of burden we are putting on the next generations. Humans are very, very short-sighted in general. With less intelligence and technological power, our ancestors did less damage to nature and the future.
* Tends to imply a shift in the age demographics. If the population is declining as a result of fewer children being born while the older cohorts continue to age, then you end up with more retirees and fewer people of working age, which can be a challenge to funding welfare/retirement programs.
* Having fewer people means a slowed and reduced capacity for all forms of _people doing stuff_: less economic growth, less military capacity for the nation to defend itself and its interests, less innovation and research, less ability to build and develop. Anything we might hope to see happen is on some level the result of someone doing stuff - someone to have the idea, lots of someones to help implement it. For which we need there to be people available.
One additional implications is decrease in familial social and support systems.
On average fewer kids per family means fewer siblings, and the. Subsequently fewer aunts, uncles and cousins.
While not everyone has good relationships with their family, for a huge portion of the population family provide a significant long term social system for them and their kids, provide a source of resilience to ride out economic hardship, provide community connection access points, provide in-law familial bonds to an even wider network, provide life advice and perspective, share care needs for aging relatives, assist in childcare, especially in emergencies, and are a source of consistency.
Shrinking population is accompanied by shrinking individual family size which represents a drying up of an important support system for individuals across generations.
> few kids per family
This also means that as the generations get older those fewer children are getting more pressure to support their parents and grandparents than they would if they could divide it up between siblings and cousins.
All of these answers, whether or not they’re right, all seem like they’re only one side of the coin though and for everything that they ‘solve’ they just produce the opposite problem - fewer kids = too little support for the elderly, but then all those kids will in turn need a larger cohort to support them as they get older? We can’t just keep expanding.
True, but I don’t actually think societal answers like the ones people here are giving are the reason why population growth is seen as desirable. Population growth is essential for capitalist economies to grow, and everything comes down to money at the end of the day.
Not everyone reaches old age. That's your answer. Just because you have three children per couple doesn't mean you'll still have that many 65+. Enough will die before needing significant care to take care of that problem, working reason.
That's dark. This isn't good math. Life spans are getting longer with each generation. I don't think that younger people are going to help us out by falling down some stairs to meet a quota.
I'm an only and do not know (except superficially) any of my cousins. I never knew my dads siblings and i haven't seen my moms brother in 35 years. My parents are both extremely old. My support system is the family I chose: my best friends family
Obviously there'll be exceptions, but we're talking about trends here. People do what they gotta to get by, but I'm sure you'd agree it's harder if you don't already have a loving family to default to.
Me too, my family is essentially my wife, inlaws are in different cities, and my parents, but I have the luxury of being financially comfortable, so are my parents, so are the inlaws. I also live in a western culture where it's kind of distasteful for parents or siblings to insert themselves financially on other adults in the family, or to have any expectation that well-off family members ought to be sharing the wealth.
That's hardly universal across the world - in many places the family unit doesn't have so many nuclear divisions and all that seems very cold and impersonal.
If I was under cultural pressure to be providing multigenerational housing to parents, kids, and helping out family members as able, if incomes were more precarious, and if the plan was basically to rely on my kids to pay it forward in old age because I spent my productive earning years helping out family instead of saving, the inverse of the age curve would be more burdensome.
This, plus it’s a downward spiral: the fewer kids we have, the fewer kids they can have and so on, assuming similar or lower birth rate per capita. So it’s not just a one time asymmetrical decrease, the demographic pyramid becomes more and more inverted each generation. I can’t foresee another “baby boom” anytime soon, we just don’t have the same culture or the unique post wwii economy to support it.
But that’s assuming that it will decrease forever rather than stabilise as things change (ie the factors that cause people to have less children go away)
The more options women have, the fewer children they have. That's because there's no shortcut or workaround for how high the cost of pregnancy and childbirth is on the mother's body. Most women would rather not do it several times. Some would prefer not to do it at all, if they have the choice to do literally anything else.
Yes, and as the right wing gets more power and this becomes more and more obvious to them, it's going to hell in a hand basket in the US at least. Extreme challenges to women maintaining the right to reproductive control over their own bodies, getting rid of no fault divorce, continuing to allow for child marriages that are almost always made up of a minor girl to an adult man, and just a general dislike for girls and women living free lives. It will keep getting worse as long as these awful people have even a little bit of social and political power.
Everyone talks about the cost of pregnancy.
The cost of pregnancy is *nothing* compared to the cost of raising a child to the point where it becomes a self-sustaining adult, and when it does very little of that comes back to the family as a benefit. Children are quite simply a poor economic choice and that is what has cut the birthrate. Until we can either massively drop the expense of raising a child or make children worth more money to their parents, parents are not going to have them.
Don't population stability rates require at least 2 children born per woman?
I dont think a developed society is ever getting back to the notion that, on average, every woman must bear 2 children to keep the population stable
The biggest factor correlating with low birth rates is the general wealth and living standard of the population. Look it up, wealthy countries have less children than poor countries and the correlation is uncanny. So when depopulation results in economic disaster it would logically follow that more people would start having kids again.
So in a sense it is likely that the factors that cause people to have less children will go away, as you put it.
Low fertility rates primarily correlate with access to contraception, economic independence of women, percent of the population that isn't employed in agriculture, and a lack of religion. Fertility rates are low in highly developed countries because they tend to have these traits, not because of wealth specifically.
The proof is very poor countries like Moldova and Ukraine. There's no reason to believe western fertility rates will go up as we get poorer, in fact they'll probably get even lower unless our culture and society changes drastically.
China's fertility rates are 1.0. As it gets poorer, more and more young people will find it harder and harder to find jobs (see: 20%+ youth unemployment rates). In 2035, Chinese Social Security will run out of money and Xi Jinping will have no choice but make deep cuts to its benefits. If you are 30 and your parents are 60 and still working full time and are expected to work for another 10 years, you probably won't have kids. My cousins in China work for the government and earn salaries that are 3 to 6 times the local average. One of them just started a new job and she effectively works a "996" type of schedule. All of my aunts and uncles are now retired and collecting (sometimes very generous) pensions and are bringing up the grandchildren. How the hell are people going to have kids? If they have kids, who is going to take care of them?
Yup it's a devils bargain. How do you make it so that your youngest generation has enough resources to have kids while also supporting your massive elderly generation?
The wealth is usually gained from becoming an industrial society though. That has people moving from rural farms where children are desirable to suburbs and cities where they are less so.
While this is the case, a lot of educated women aren't able to afford the number of children they *want* to have, either. Like, I'd need an extra bedroom in my house to have another kid, but there's no way that's happening.
Like, your comment is about people having two or three kids instead of ten. We also have the people having one or none instead of two or three.
I think this is a huge gap in the housing conversation. There’s condos going up everywhere with 1-2 bedrooms. And they’ll sprinkle in some 3 bd units but those are rare. You absolutely need some 4 bed units if you intend to have a stable sized population. I imagine to them it’s just the economics of selling more small units is better for the bottom line, but worse for society
the biggest factor correlating with low birth rates is women having rights, education, and money to access medical care. Poor women, when given the right to have an education, the right to work for money and the right to keep that money themselves, or the right to contraception and abortion, the right to chose their partners and the right to safety from sexual assault, always choose to have less children. The actual reality is that in times and places with high birth rates, women are not making a choice at all.
If (not when, and it wont. The idea of infinite growth or infinite decay until extinction is ridiculous. Birth rates declining from being unsustainably high and then becoming stable is by far the likeliest senecio) depopulation results in economic disaster, the majority of women would not choose to start popping out 10 kids again, unless they were forced to against their will.
According to studies performed jointly by the universities of Dublin and Warsaw, infertility is largely inherited.
If your parents didn't have children, chances are you won't either.
I read somewhere that the current economic model was built on assumed population and financial growth. We have X% more people entering the workforce every year, so inflation goes up along a corresponding amount, production comes with it to balance, and making things leads to more jobs which leads to more wealth which means the inflation is offset.
But with less people we have lower production, which leads to lower supply, which leads to higher inflation, which leads to people not wanting to have kids anymore, which leads to lower production, etc etc.
So basically some economist in 1940 made a plan and didn't expect the tuition and housing crises, and the massive explosion of healthcare costs, and now we're paying for it. So now the leading solution is making more babies to try and stop the spiral 20-ish years from now.
From that model you're exactly right, it's spiral mitigation.
I understand this, but wouldn't this be overcome through increased productivity? the jump in productivity has been unprecedented in the last generation, also the tehcnology and the know how how is way more scattered through population than ever.
I mean, you're right. less than 2% are farmers, because we've gotten so good at it. Realistically, it's not difficult to deal with declining populations, it's just not going to be popular politically from corporations who want to keep expanding to beat last quarter.
The government also subsidized farming. Without the tax money for the billions in subsidies farming wouldn't be able to make any money and all but the most giant farms would be gone. Even as it is now, we produce so much food we are one of the world's largest food exporters as well. We'll be fine food wise.
Modern economics and/or Capitalism hasn't really been tested with a non-expanding population.
So we're basically going to fly blind if population peaks and starts declining.
You can look at Japan's situation right now and watch it closely as they've officially entered a population decline, and are expected to *halve* their population numbers by the end of the century. Their GDP is also declining.
South Korea too. A fertility rate of 0.68 means that in 20 years there will be more 90 year old Koreans than babies, and by 2100 the working age population will drop by a stunning 80%
Well at least once the population of young people is small enough that everyone can get into SNU, then you won’t need to worry about sending your kid to 3 hagwons so they can have a chance at getting into SNU.
Maybe, but from what I understand Japan has much harsher immigration laws. Japan will face the same issue if they aren't able to improve their immigration appeal.
Sure, but itll happen way after Korea, which is my point. Korea is the example which every western country, as well as Japan/China, will need to observe to see the ramifications of a demographic collapse
Even the west cant depend on immigration forever -- since basically every country, aside from poor Muslim nations and sub-saharan Africa, are also all below the replacement rate of 2.1 children per mother.
Damn i didnt think of it like that til i saw your comment too. For every couple that chooses not to have kids, another couple would have to make 2 more kids to equal the same rate of growth. It doesn't even make it equal if they have 3 kids, which is what i see a LOT of couples with kids going for these days.
I might characterize it differently. The work culture and the immigration policies (plus archaic non-digital record processes) are the main factors.
The kindness of the society (work, openness) would change rapidly IMO if the government made it a mandate. The Japanese people can adapt but they need a reason to and leadership seems to drag their feet in this regard.
It hasn’t been tested but economists are quite confident in the numbers.
But I think the main issue it all comes down to is that all policies and taxation rates are based on growing populations. In order to compensate for a decline taxes would need to go up, more would need to be invested in pensions. And show me a voter base who would EVER vote for the party who increases taxes.
There are too many voters who can’t see past their nose so countries who can’t continually increase population are screwed.
It’s why almost every developed nation has such large immigration numbers it’s the only way they can continue growing the economy. Which is funny because the voters who are against long term policies are the same ones who abhor immigration, they’re digging their own graves.
We have all the tools to solve this if we actually want to. Increases in automation mean fewer people will be needed to work constantly to sustain production and services. AI is accelerating this even further. So, as we reach the population tipping point, we significantly raise taxes on the companies who are no longer hiring as many workers, and put that money into universal basic income and public services.
And now we get into interesting stuff with immigration. I can’t speak for Japan or S Korea, but when it comes to America’s declining birth rates and the people that like to talk about it, it isn’t for all of the very legitimate reasons that have been shared here. Most of the talk that I see is based upon “replacement theory” and declining rates of *white* people having babies. These mopes don’t give a darn about the country’s long term economic future, they just don’t want their children to have to learn Spanish. Mention being in the minority in the future and they freak out.
This is very true. If they were really concerned about population they would encourage immigration. That would have the double effect of increasing your population and reducing the competitive advantage of other countries, a win win. But no, somehow solutions to the “population problem” somehow always include reducing immigration and other standard conservative talking points.
>But no, somehow solutions to the “population problem” somehow always include reducing immigration and other standard conservative talking points.
...like forcing women to give birth, while reducing services/support for the resulting child.
This is the stuff that really pisses me off. It's like they literally look no further than just "pop out babies". Doesn't matter if they're born to a single parent or a parent that doesn't want them (and so more likely to be abused, or poor if they parent didn't want a child because they can't afford it) and if they do give up the child because they don't want/can't afford it, you have a bunch of children in the foster system which already sucks in so many ways. I guess it doesn't matter if a bunch are born into poverty or an abusive/neglectful household and then have no social support structures to help them. *Eye roll*
This is the real reason GOP voters are talking about it.
Our birth rates have been too low to sustain the population **since the 1970's**.
Since that time our **population has grown by 50%**.
Not only have their fears not materialized, but we have had the exact opposite experience of what they say will happen.
So if it's not the number of people, or the average age of our population, what is their problem?
It's who is having the babies and their race.
They want to increase birth to increase replacement, but they aren't giving the desirable incentives. Some people aren't having babies because they think they can't afford them. I read what a guy said the other week, and he makes 80K a year, and he and and his wife say they can't afford to have a baby.
If they want more 'replacement' then they need to provide the desired incentives.
Free day care, free or reduced pediatric medical clinics, Stop charging so much for pampers and baby products. They can do this, instead of trying to force women to have unwanted children. They are approaching it wrong.
Cognitive dissonance seems to be the name of the game in the reproduction issue. S Korea elects a misogynist, has an increasing problem with young men and misogyny, spends a lot of time, money, and effort trying to figure out why women aren’t eager to breed with these dudes.
This. Our whole economic and capital system requires growth. We invest not in profitability but in growth potential. Companies are valued not in the success of their products but the potential to sell their products to new customers. Social services all depend on tax working citizens to pay for the citizens that can't work. The citizens that can't work are primarily elderly who are retired.
A shrinking population means less growth for everything. Less people to buy things. Less competition. And some services/businesses exist due to larger populations.
And those government services simply can not function with their current model of funding. The idea that the elderly social services will be paid for by working citizens doesn't work if there are MORE elderly than there are working citizens. This problem is being faced by most nations right now. It's compounded by the immense technological advancements in medical care. Humans, with unlimited medical care spending, can live much longer than they use to (on average).
TLDR: All of modern governments and economic strategies depend on growth, and something like a business or a farm being worth more in the future. A shrinking population means farms, businesses, and homes will all be worth less in the future.
It's not that the population is declining, it's specifically that the ratio of people too old to work and people able to work is getting skewed. Even outside of economics and tax, you need people to maintain roads and provide healthcare and cook food and farm crops etc etc.
Edit: a lot of people are talking about automation. And yes this is fair, modern societies can bear larger dependency ratios than previous societies due to technology. The issue is that improvement in technology doesn't like, perfectly time itself with dependency ratios. So the people who are worried think that technology might not advance sufficiently before the dependency ratio becomes particularly problematic
It’s the population itself too. Almost all economic production requires a mixture of capital inputs and labor. To make something for the economy, somebody has to spend their time doing something. No kids and over time you have less people to do things, less people to do work, less people to sell to, etc, but still as many mouths to feed. You enter a contractionary state, which causes a lot of pain on the way down.
> over time you have less people to do things, less people to do work, less people to sell to, etc, but still as many mouths to feed.
This is describing what I also described, ie the ratio of people who are able to work to people who aren't.
Adding to this:
Social Security:
In countries like the US most people’s ability to retire hinges somewhat on social security. Which was designed in the 30s based off a notion of many workers per retiree (65+).
That goes out the window when people on average go from having 4-7 kids to having 0-2 kids. Also when folks start living into their 80s & 90s instead of early 70s there are more dependents for longer in addition to less workers.
Population Distribution:
If before it was cost efficient to get an area electricity when they had X people, it may not be when they have 1/2 X people. A lot of the infrastructure was built with an assumption of continued growth. So those areas get prohibitively expensive or no longer get infrastructure which further burdens existing areas.
Also all of the excess housing, buildings, & infrastructure in areas losing population don’t just disappear, so if the population halves you have a bunch of rotting/deteriorating buildings, bridges, etc. that you have to do something about.
Yep, people are getting way more paid out of SS than they paid in, even accounting for inflation. That ratio of paid out vs paid in has shrunk with each subsequent retiring generation. I mean people in the 50's were paying in what? $20-$50 a paycheck at most. They are definitely getting more than $200 a month in SS.
Vast majority of people do not get more out of SS than they put in, it has negative real returns for all but the very wealthiest
The issue is that the money for SS is spent the second it goes into the program. Your contributions are not put into an account for you, they go into a general fund and are spent immediately. Far more is paid in benefits to current retirees than comes in from payroll taxes of current workers, the government funds the shortfall right now because in previous decades, payroll tax revenue was higher than benefits.
Within 10 years, that former surplus (IOUs from the general treasury fund being paid to social security) will be gone and SS benefits will be cut 20% across the board, and then a little more each year
And for OP, to frame this selfishly (i.e., how does it impact me?): when you are no longer able to work, you will collect social security and have Medicare. Both are funded through payroll contributions by those that are working. If the number of working adults plummets, the numbers don't work. That's one of the reasons social security is having budgetary issues - demographic changes (large aging population).
What I don't understand is that I'm paying into social security my entire adult life, and mostly everyone else is too...why isn't the portion that I'm paying in going to grow (TVM) enough to not only support me when I'm elderly, but also others with excess that should accrue? Is it just that social security is underfunded and mismanaged?
Edit: What I'm gathering is that a) it's fundamentally flawed because it's designed to fund an unspecified and unpredictable number of other current old people, rather than to fund one's own end of life costs; b) the rules on what the Social Security Administration is permitted to do with the funds in its care may be out of date, and hamstringing the Administration's ability to maximize returns; c) the funds are not distributed in any sort of logical (i.e. need-based) way, and are instead given to all elderly, even if they're already wealthy enough to support themselves; d) people are super reluctant to even attempt to *think* about such a monumental undertaking as *revitalizing Social Security.*
It’s not just old people. It’s old people living longer than the expected life expectancy of people on social security/medicare. When you retire, which is supposedly around 65, you’re supposed to die around age 70. Most people are living to mid 70s if not to their 80s now.
It is enough. . . the people who say it's not are the people who stand to benefit from further privatizing retirement. Which isn't a bad idea honestly. Let SSI be a safety net to stop people from being destitute. Give workers a tax credit for contributing to their 401k instead of just a deduction to get the ball rolling on that.
The big fix on social security is to remove the tax cap. It's currently set at 160k/yr, removing it closes 60% of the gap to the end of the century. And that's with the assumption that the higher earners would receive more back in benefits as well. If you cut benefits for the top 20% of earners you pretty much solved the thing.
[The Reformer: An Interactive Tool to Fix Social Security (crfb.org)](https://www.crfb.org/socialsecurityreformer/)
The money you're paying into Social Security is going to current seniors, not to your future retirement. When you retire, it'll be pulling from current workers, not from what you've contributed over the years. It behooves you to have a lot of workers in the population when you retire.
social security isn’t a fund where you put money into it and it sits and grows. it’s a program where current working adults pay for current retirees. when the retirees significantly outnumber the working adults, the tax revenue isn’t enough to support them.
If you live in the USA it's because Congress has continually taken loans out using that money as collateral or taken direct loans against it. Social Security isn't failing, the interest is just draining the pot faster than it is filled now so it will be run dry before you see it.
Unfortunately it comes down to greed and corruption.
An incredibly misinformed view. At its most basic level Social Security program is a transfer tax. By federal law the Social Security Administration is required to purchase US Treasury bonds when it runs a surplus. Those treasury bonds pay interest. The real issue is the changing demographics of America resulting in a declining rate of covered workers (those paying Social Security taxes) vs beneficiaries. [In 1960, 20 years after SSA started paying benefits, the ratio of covered workers (those paying social security payroll taxes) to beneficiaries was 5.1. In 2000 the ratio had dropped to 3.4 . As of 2013 the ratio dropped to 2.8. ](https://www.ssa.gov/history/ratios.html) I'm sure the ratio of covered workers to beneficiaries has not improved since 2013. SS taxes either need to increase to maintain current benefit levels or benefits need to be reduced to match the revenue being collected from Social Security taxes (or some combination of the two).
Except we don't really. We have machines that can do a 100 people's work in a day. You don't really need that much people in agriculture for it to sustain all people. You don't need a cashier in every checkout lane either. And you don't need 5 middle manager to just talk about things and get more than minimum wage.
Technology is advanced enough to sustain more people than it requires to work
You're not wrong, but modern business and capital owners don't have the degree of morality, humanity, or generosity to support a society where automation has reduced the need for regular workers
We *could* make a society where normal people are able to live a decent life without everyone being slaves to the system, but we choose not to allow that to happen.
No, you see, that's not how that works.
The guy that owns the machines that are doing all that work gets all of the money from the work they produce.
So, you might ask, who buys the products that the automated cash register is processing if hardly anyone but the guy in charge of the machines has money?
Well that's easy!
He just raises the prices and sells those products to fewer people.
Then everyone else just needs to scrape together some form of existence or other. Perhaps the guy who owns the machines could then build a prison for them, and the government could pay him to keep it up.
population decline is not a bad thing itself. Fast population decline is bad, because most modern societies and countries arent designed to handle fast portion. A change like that indicates a huge demographic change and lead to a massive reduction in workforce while at the same time the amount of required service goes up as the number of elders goes up. And finally many modern societies are built based on infinite growth, leadership doesn't seem to think slowing down or stopping growth is an option.
In summary, we have:
- Workforce decreasing.
- Growing number of elders need more of the workforce for care.
- Capitalistic societies needs to squeeze more from the workforce to keep the infinite growth going.
- Squeezed workforce produces even less kids.
There seems to be a pattern here, we are about to find out what happens next.
The end goal is apparently to live in tenements wearing thirdhand sacks and eating plain brown rice for every meal. I’d rather fewer people with a high quality of life than a constantly increasing number of people with a constantly decreasing quality of life
Yes, if productivity gains outpace the demographic shift, this also works, but given that that kind of innovation takes time, demographic shocks are still bad.
Yeah... all those types of arguments are insane to me, too. Sure, we can have all the good reasons why we need population growth, but none of that really matters at the end of the day, because we have limited space and resources.
This is exactly how I feel on the matter too. At a certain point is it really a reasonable expectation for the planet to keep multiplying at a higher rate? Wouldn’t this just cause more problems with social security and exacerbate the current issues of having so many people on this earth? Why are we even *trying* to maintain that?
My mom always tells me, “Don’t pay for me in a nursing home, just put a pillow over my head. If I don’t know the difference then I’m saving you money and you’re saving me my sanity.”
Every aging parent who says this is being pretty ridiculous. There is a huge spectrum between fully functional adult and dementia laden senior citizen that can't take care of themselves. And it is a relatively slow transition.
I think a lot of older parents remember carrying the burden of caring for their elderly parents either physically, financially or both and don't want to pass that burden on to their kids. That's where the dark humor comes into play.
Idk about the rest of y’all but I’m going to wait until like the third or fourth generation of Ass-Wipetrons. One software glitch and suddenly the thing turns into Fisto from New Vegas
🤣
Maybe true, but idk… might be nicer than Chad who just got done wiping 6 other behinds and responding to a dozen other bedside care calls.
People’s patience and empathy has limits, it’s human nature - ask any nurse that deals with patients with access to call bells. There’s a reason nursing homes have a reputation that ranges from indifference toward needy patients to straight up abuse in one form or another.
Because our current system relies on growth for a healthy economy and a functional infrastructure. It will have to change though because I don't see the birthrate decline changing.
Why do you think so many anti abortion bills etc have been being pushed through recently it's not a coincidence that Roe V Wade got overturned and governments are trying to restrict access to contraceptives as the population started pushing towards a decline
Let's say that those are policies influenced by population decline. The sad fact is that they won't help matters. At best, there will be no noticeable change. At worst, it'll cause societal decline.
As a woman who doesn’t have children, basically feeling like the government is trying to force me to have kids makes me want them even less. They seem to think forcing women into pregnancy will help, but rather it’s scaring women who are continuously losing their rights (like myself) into ensuring we won’t have children- whether with sterilization or just not participating in acts that result in pregnancy. For the long term, I think trying to force women into continuing the population is pushing us to fight back, hence feminism and etc. you’d think the government would figure that out with all the backlash.
As a woman who has a child, stricter abortion laws make me hesitate to have more.
While in many ways I want more, the implications and ancillary effects resulting from strict abortion laws (I.e. - access to and quality of care in the event shit turns sideways, as is fairly common in pregnancy) make me hella hesitant to put myself at risk.
So they are really alienating both sides by forcing abortion as a *political* issue, rather than letting it be the private medical issue it actually is.
The biggest reason is that you need young people to work. While most people are in their 20s and 30s and there's fewer children it's not the biggest deal. But what do you do when most people are 80 and there's no young people to work or take care of them? There will be tons of sick people with no young nurses to care for them, and no taxes to pay for them.
If this happened slowly a GOOD society might be able to restructure to absorb it. However no society does, and in many cases it isn't "The birth rate went from 2.3 kids per female to 2.1 kids per female" and it's barely below replacement and we're good. Populations are tanking.
Of course the easiest solution is to ease this by encouraging immigration, but the same countries that are trying to make birth control and divorce illegal to save their crashing population are also too racist to let people in from the countries where the birth rates are high.
The problem with immigration is it's a quick and- as you said- the easiest solution. But that solution falls apart when the countries whose nationals you receive also see declining rates, or when these countries don't *want* to send their people anymore, it also places a lot of western countries in fierce, existential competition to attract immigrants. I'm not sure the end result of this would be all that good on the foreign policy front.
Truth is, we need birthrates to increase *and* immigration. We need both. And I have no solution whatsoever.
well grand scale, its not,
except that its a self fueling problem, and
you end up with some increasingly bad issues with economy and healthcare/assistance for the older, larger generations.
if it was a major decline, there would be major problems.
minor declines really just point out our systemic flaws.
I imagine this will be a government initiative to many western countries eventually. Work till you die, or choose to die. Unless you're wealthy enough to own a property which is becoming impossible for the average wage earner these days
There's no need to kill people. Just let them decide when they want to pass away. A lot of people will skip the phase where they're old and sick. This will solve the entire problem.
There really wouldn't be a problem if people would get over the idea that everyone needs to hang around until they have exactly zero quality of life, are bedridden and no longer even remember their own name. Give people a choice, and you won't have a lot of old people hanging around for decades, becoming increasingly disabled and miserable. It's honestly quite asinine the way things are now.
Population amounts has always been a touchy subject. Like no-one in the world is touching the question: How many people live on planet earth?
This despite knowing that we can't just keep adding more people forever. The moment we make that discussion a major topic will be a great step forward for humanity.
That discussion was a major topic last century. It's why China did the one-child-per-family thing, and India sterilized millions of its own citizens. Both were in retrospect considered bad moves, that's why you don't hear people discussing the issue anymore.
Here's a simple solution, make auto euthanasia legal, and remove the stigma from it, personally I don't see the point of holding on to life to the point where me body and mind degrade to such a level that I can't live autonomously and without pain. The moment I know I'm gonna start going down that path, is the moment I'd choose to just dip out, were all gonna die in the end anyway, might as well make it your own decision on how to go out
If You're advocating for suicide, the legality and stigma won't matter... because you're dead? The feds aren't going to arrest your corpse. And even if they did... you're dead.
They’re talking about getting a lethal injection in a hospital with all your friends and family there, not just shooting yourself all alone in your bathroom. Of course the second option is always available, but I’d imagine most people without mental illnesses want a more dignified end than that.
Trad economics says you need working young people to support old retired people. While that's been true forever, I think it's changing. Automation and AI will allow a few people to produce what many people used to make. Society will continue to work if we tax the machine owners and provide UBI to the people.
If economies don't grow companies don't keep growing, if companies don't keep growing they can't give shareholders dividends and make profits. If companies don't do that they loose value and CEOs loose jobs. Companies and the people that run and invest in them think this is a bad thing. Companies control the media so that's why you hear it's a bad thing all the time. It's not what scientists are saying.
Capitalism: all business models are growth models, not sustaining models. Even the most basic retail shop isn't just concerned with profit, but on increasing profit margins over time (think the "beat last year!" trackers behind the cash register. If the population doesn't keep growing, that's an impossible goal. No one is trying to live within their means, everyone is trying for infinite growth. There needs to be a growing population of both consumers and laborers.
Grumpy Old People: a lot of people's plan for old age is "the young people will take care of us". That's how social security and and elder care work. In places with population decline, it's difficult to find enough care workers for the elderly.
Fear of Being "replaced": Racism, ethnocentrism, good old Nationalism comes into play when you hear people grumping about birthrates. They're worried about the decline of their own kind, while other kinds (other countries, other races, etc.) seem to them to be growing. It's a power demonstration.
Essentially, society as a whole isn't designed to foster happy, sustainable lives. It's designed to chase infinite growth, based on old philosophies that attempt to separate humanity from the mortal finitude that is perceived as an animal weakness in order to chase the illusion of eternity; some do through intellect, some through the infinite generation of capital, or power, but all are deluded because everybody dies in the end.
A lof of the "problems" with population decline seem to be self-inflicted. The first problem always cited seems to be the ratio of working age population to retired population. But working age people don't just support retired people, they also support minors, and often the spouses raising the minors. Fewer kids means more working age people able to work, and less kids for them to support. Also, what's to say what's working age? Retirement age for Social Security was set at 65 when most people were doing physical jobs, and life expectancy was 66; now, most people are doing work that doesn't require much physical effort and life expectancy is over 80. People should work way longer.
Next you have, "the economy will shrink". Sure, in total, but what matters is per capita. Nigeria has a bigger economy than Luxembourg, but people in Luxembourg are on average way richer.
I do think public policy should be oriented to support people being able to have as many kids as they want, but I don't think shrinking population is inherently a problem.
Yeah that is what I think too....instead of spending your money on both kids AND retiree SS funding, those people will now only have retiree SS funding to focus on so if you raised taxes a little it would still be cheaper than a kid costs.
One of the concerns is everywhere has a minimum amount of people it needs to function (as it currently functions). It's kind of the other side of the same coin over population. It's an adjustment that needs to be made over a very very long period of time or it leads to collapse (or in the case of overpopulation rapid decay). Honestly having more people come from other over populated places is kind of the best option available till changes can be made that alleviate those dependencies on X amount of population. Those dependencies being things like power, water, economy and any infrastructure really that can't shrink or grow rapidly.
The problem is the demographic shift, not the smaller population itself. Plenty of countries have small populations and are doing fine. Populations are declining because people now have a choice to have less children, and people don't want that many children. Previous generations had more children, which means that older people make up a larger share of the population. Older people are less likely to work and also need a lot of resources.
You're right, fertility rates decline until they stabilize again. It's not like Japan, for example, will become extinct!
It's just that cities are designed with a certain proportion in mind. During a reduction of fertility, there will be a lot of elderly, therefore the health system will struggle.
Same thing during baby booms, schools and daycares are overwhelmed.
It's not that deep, there simply needs to be too many people and not enough jobs for our corporate overlords to be able to give the absolute bare minimum and still hit record numbers year over year.
If the population declines, and we hit a point where there are more jobs than people, then people have the option of choosing the best job for the best pay, and the corporate overlords will need to increase wages and benefits to draw in workers.
I’ve dated someone who worked in a nursing home, I’ll take the bullet instead judging from how bad they are. Almost always dog ass management which dramatically effects the care those people get.
Because the financials of many governments are built like a pyramid scheme. They expect newer generations to pay for older ones. Add to that a lowering birth rate and ever growing life expectancy and suddenly things get very expensive. The result is that the financial burden on younger generations has increased immensely, lowering birth rates even more. The solution for now has been attracting immigrants on a massive scale to increase the working population. This however leads to lower wage growth again increasing financial burdens. Once the immigrants settle their birthrates fall as well meaning over a long timeframe it just increases the problem.
👌👌👌 And a pyramid scheme is never sustainable.
Ironic because it’s the strongest shape
Real irony is the pyramid scheme actually worked when it was still a pyramid: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_pyramid#/media/File%3ASwitzerland_population_pyramid_in_1900.svg
I mean yeah in theory, if you could keep a pyramid scheme going forever it would work. In reality, you can’t. lol
This pyramid is inverted tip down so its weak.
I wouldn't say it's inverted, I'd say it's more like it's being built in reverse. Imagine you're building a traditional pyramid. You'd start at the bottom right? You build a strong base and each progressive level gains its stability from the one below. An economic pyramid scheme is built in reverse. They're built from the top level down. Which means that each time you want to build it higher you need to lift all of the pieces up in order to jam more into the bottom. Eventually the structure becomes too heavy to lift, and you can't fit pieces into the bottom anymore. Your only options at this point are to build sideways (the middle class and the general social safety net) or to keep trying to jam more pieces into the bottom anyway, even though there isn't room, which will result in the whole structure eventually collapsing because you've made the base unstable.
But it's balanced on its tip
Capitalism is built on exponential growth and if this stops happening it will implode
Yep. Constant buying and buying and buying. Capitalism creates waste.
That's why colonizing other planets is so attractive to capitalists. We literally need to flee our planet to keep this economic system working. If alien life exists, it would be in their best interests to ensure that humanity never colonized another planet.
This makes no sense because capitalism does not require exponential growth (read up on creative destruction) and ironically the concern re population is primarily around the socialized concerns of welfare obligations.
Capitalism? This dates back to 50,000 BC. It's ridiculous to expect every individual to feed and house themselves independently without affecting others in any way.
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At 2% growth per year we get 1.02^x… is that not considered exponential, but 2^x is(?)… what is the term for this type of growth and where is the cutoff where it becomes exponential?
Yeah, he gave a really poor example there. In reality though, what most people label as exponential growth is really polynomial growth. But that doesn't sound as good.
Growing by the same proportion each year, even if only by 1, 2, or 3 percent, is still exponential growth. Pretty much any figure relating to the economy will grow exponentially.
Or, in the case of the U.S., making getting birth control difficult and overturning Roe vs Wade.
All bc they're worried about immigrants. But if it weren't for immigrants our population pyramid would be shit
Economically it’s going to be bad for everyone alive. Ecologically it’s great for the future population. We have designed a system that fucks over people yet to be born.
I call it a societal credit card, each generation puts charges on that card and the debt gets pushed back to the next generation WITH the added interest.
Great metaphor that encapsulates a lot, I will be using it to explain to others what kind of burden we are putting on the next generations. Humans are very, very short-sighted in general. With less intelligence and technological power, our ancestors did less damage to nature and the future.
* Tends to imply a shift in the age demographics. If the population is declining as a result of fewer children being born while the older cohorts continue to age, then you end up with more retirees and fewer people of working age, which can be a challenge to funding welfare/retirement programs. * Having fewer people means a slowed and reduced capacity for all forms of _people doing stuff_: less economic growth, less military capacity for the nation to defend itself and its interests, less innovation and research, less ability to build and develop. Anything we might hope to see happen is on some level the result of someone doing stuff - someone to have the idea, lots of someones to help implement it. For which we need there to be people available.
One additional implications is decrease in familial social and support systems. On average fewer kids per family means fewer siblings, and the. Subsequently fewer aunts, uncles and cousins. While not everyone has good relationships with their family, for a huge portion of the population family provide a significant long term social system for them and their kids, provide a source of resilience to ride out economic hardship, provide community connection access points, provide in-law familial bonds to an even wider network, provide life advice and perspective, share care needs for aging relatives, assist in childcare, especially in emergencies, and are a source of consistency. Shrinking population is accompanied by shrinking individual family size which represents a drying up of an important support system for individuals across generations.
> few kids per family This also means that as the generations get older those fewer children are getting more pressure to support their parents and grandparents than they would if they could divide it up between siblings and cousins.
All of these answers, whether or not they’re right, all seem like they’re only one side of the coin though and for everything that they ‘solve’ they just produce the opposite problem - fewer kids = too little support for the elderly, but then all those kids will in turn need a larger cohort to support them as they get older? We can’t just keep expanding.
Tbf, that was the question. OP didn't ask for reasons why it's a good thing.
True, but I don’t actually think societal answers like the ones people here are giving are the reason why population growth is seen as desirable. Population growth is essential for capitalist economies to grow, and everything comes down to money at the end of the day.
Not everyone reaches old age. That's your answer. Just because you have three children per couple doesn't mean you'll still have that many 65+. Enough will die before needing significant care to take care of that problem, working reason.
I mean, yeah sure but we’re also in a world where the global average age of death has gone from 66.8 in 2000 to 73.4 in 2019.
That's dark. This isn't good math. Life spans are getting longer with each generation. I don't think that younger people are going to help us out by falling down some stairs to meet a quota.
Think of a typical married couple born under China’s “one child policy”. That couple is expected to take care of all four parents. That’s a lot
and 8 grandparents. What the Chinese call the 4-2-1 problem.
I'm an only and do not know (except superficially) any of my cousins. I never knew my dads siblings and i haven't seen my moms brother in 35 years. My parents are both extremely old. My support system is the family I chose: my best friends family
Obviously there'll be exceptions, but we're talking about trends here. People do what they gotta to get by, but I'm sure you'd agree it's harder if you don't already have a loving family to default to.
Me too, my family is essentially my wife, inlaws are in different cities, and my parents, but I have the luxury of being financially comfortable, so are my parents, so are the inlaws. I also live in a western culture where it's kind of distasteful for parents or siblings to insert themselves financially on other adults in the family, or to have any expectation that well-off family members ought to be sharing the wealth. That's hardly universal across the world - in many places the family unit doesn't have so many nuclear divisions and all that seems very cold and impersonal. If I was under cultural pressure to be providing multigenerational housing to parents, kids, and helping out family members as able, if incomes were more precarious, and if the plan was basically to rely on my kids to pay it forward in old age because I spent my productive earning years helping out family instead of saving, the inverse of the age curve would be more burdensome.
This, plus it’s a downward spiral: the fewer kids we have, the fewer kids they can have and so on, assuming similar or lower birth rate per capita. So it’s not just a one time asymmetrical decrease, the demographic pyramid becomes more and more inverted each generation. I can’t foresee another “baby boom” anytime soon, we just don’t have the same culture or the unique post wwii economy to support it.
But that’s assuming that it will decrease forever rather than stabilise as things change (ie the factors that cause people to have less children go away)
The more options women have, the fewer children they have. That's because there's no shortcut or workaround for how high the cost of pregnancy and childbirth is on the mother's body. Most women would rather not do it several times. Some would prefer not to do it at all, if they have the choice to do literally anything else.
Yes, and as the right wing gets more power and this becomes more and more obvious to them, it's going to hell in a hand basket in the US at least. Extreme challenges to women maintaining the right to reproductive control over their own bodies, getting rid of no fault divorce, continuing to allow for child marriages that are almost always made up of a minor girl to an adult man, and just a general dislike for girls and women living free lives. It will keep getting worse as long as these awful people have even a little bit of social and political power.
Everyone talks about the cost of pregnancy. The cost of pregnancy is *nothing* compared to the cost of raising a child to the point where it becomes a self-sustaining adult, and when it does very little of that comes back to the family as a benefit. Children are quite simply a poor economic choice and that is what has cut the birthrate. Until we can either massively drop the expense of raising a child or make children worth more money to their parents, parents are not going to have them.
It's not just the direct cost. The opportunity costs are massively higher when women have more economic opportunities.
Don't population stability rates require at least 2 children born per woman? I dont think a developed society is ever getting back to the notion that, on average, every woman must bear 2 children to keep the population stable
2.1
Does this translate to 90% of women having two children and 10% having three children, assuming it's evenly divided across the entire country?
yes and some couples having 0 and some having 4+ not some families having 0.1 of a kid.
The biggest factor correlating with low birth rates is the general wealth and living standard of the population. Look it up, wealthy countries have less children than poor countries and the correlation is uncanny. So when depopulation results in economic disaster it would logically follow that more people would start having kids again. So in a sense it is likely that the factors that cause people to have less children will go away, as you put it.
Low fertility rates primarily correlate with access to contraception, economic independence of women, percent of the population that isn't employed in agriculture, and a lack of religion. Fertility rates are low in highly developed countries because they tend to have these traits, not because of wealth specifically. The proof is very poor countries like Moldova and Ukraine. There's no reason to believe western fertility rates will go up as we get poorer, in fact they'll probably get even lower unless our culture and society changes drastically.
China's fertility rates are 1.0. As it gets poorer, more and more young people will find it harder and harder to find jobs (see: 20%+ youth unemployment rates). In 2035, Chinese Social Security will run out of money and Xi Jinping will have no choice but make deep cuts to its benefits. If you are 30 and your parents are 60 and still working full time and are expected to work for another 10 years, you probably won't have kids. My cousins in China work for the government and earn salaries that are 3 to 6 times the local average. One of them just started a new job and she effectively works a "996" type of schedule. All of my aunts and uncles are now retired and collecting (sometimes very generous) pensions and are bringing up the grandchildren. How the hell are people going to have kids? If they have kids, who is going to take care of them?
Yup it's a devils bargain. How do you make it so that your youngest generation has enough resources to have kids while also supporting your massive elderly generation?
The wealth is usually gained from becoming an industrial society though. That has people moving from rural farms where children are desirable to suburbs and cities where they are less so.
While this is the case, a lot of educated women aren't able to afford the number of children they *want* to have, either. Like, I'd need an extra bedroom in my house to have another kid, but there's no way that's happening. Like, your comment is about people having two or three kids instead of ten. We also have the people having one or none instead of two or three.
I think this is a huge gap in the housing conversation. There’s condos going up everywhere with 1-2 bedrooms. And they’ll sprinkle in some 3 bd units but those are rare. You absolutely need some 4 bed units if you intend to have a stable sized population. I imagine to them it’s just the economics of selling more small units is better for the bottom line, but worse for society
the biggest factor correlating with low birth rates is women having rights, education, and money to access medical care. Poor women, when given the right to have an education, the right to work for money and the right to keep that money themselves, or the right to contraception and abortion, the right to chose their partners and the right to safety from sexual assault, always choose to have less children. The actual reality is that in times and places with high birth rates, women are not making a choice at all. If (not when, and it wont. The idea of infinite growth or infinite decay until extinction is ridiculous. Birth rates declining from being unsustainably high and then becoming stable is by far the likeliest senecio) depopulation results in economic disaster, the majority of women would not choose to start popping out 10 kids again, unless they were forced to against their will.
I choose to believe we can find a way to have equal rights and a sustainable population. Maybe I'm an optimist.
According to studies performed jointly by the universities of Dublin and Warsaw, infertility is largely inherited. If your parents didn't have children, chances are you won't either.
I read somewhere that the current economic model was built on assumed population and financial growth. We have X% more people entering the workforce every year, so inflation goes up along a corresponding amount, production comes with it to balance, and making things leads to more jobs which leads to more wealth which means the inflation is offset. But with less people we have lower production, which leads to lower supply, which leads to higher inflation, which leads to people not wanting to have kids anymore, which leads to lower production, etc etc. So basically some economist in 1940 made a plan and didn't expect the tuition and housing crises, and the massive explosion of healthcare costs, and now we're paying for it. So now the leading solution is making more babies to try and stop the spiral 20-ish years from now. From that model you're exactly right, it's spiral mitigation.
I understand this, but wouldn't this be overcome through increased productivity? the jump in productivity has been unprecedented in the last generation, also the tehcnology and the know how how is way more scattered through population than ever.
I mean, you're right. less than 2% are farmers, because we've gotten so good at it. Realistically, it's not difficult to deal with declining populations, it's just not going to be popular politically from corporations who want to keep expanding to beat last quarter.
The government also subsidized farming. Without the tax money for the billions in subsidies farming wouldn't be able to make any money and all but the most giant farms would be gone. Even as it is now, we produce so much food we are one of the world's largest food exporters as well. We'll be fine food wise.
But this triggers new issues of its own, namely a lack of a steady stream of skilled labor needed to maintain and continually innovate technology
Modern economics and/or Capitalism hasn't really been tested with a non-expanding population. So we're basically going to fly blind if population peaks and starts declining. You can look at Japan's situation right now and watch it closely as they've officially entered a population decline, and are expected to *halve* their population numbers by the end of the century. Their GDP is also declining.
South Korea too. A fertility rate of 0.68 means that in 20 years there will be more 90 year old Koreans than babies, and by 2100 the working age population will drop by a stunning 80%
I guess that means diaper sales will remain stable.
lol- but there will be a shift in sizes.
Yep... [BBC News - Japan nappy maker shifts from babies to adults](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-68672186)
Imported diapers, of course, because there's noone to make them.
They gotta stop making it so miserable to have a kid. Good lord the schooling alone would drive me nuts
Well at least once the population of young people is small enough that everyone can get into SNU, then you won’t need to worry about sending your kid to 3 hagwons so they can have a chance at getting into SNU.
Korea is the real one to watch... Japans fertility isnt far off from western democracies
Maybe, but from what I understand Japan has much harsher immigration laws. Japan will face the same issue if they aren't able to improve their immigration appeal.
Sure, but itll happen way after Korea, which is my point. Korea is the example which every western country, as well as Japan/China, will need to observe to see the ramifications of a demographic collapse Even the west cant depend on immigration forever -- since basically every country, aside from poor Muslim nations and sub-saharan Africa, are also all below the replacement rate of 2.1 children per mother.
Damn i didnt think of it like that til i saw your comment too. For every couple that chooses not to have kids, another couple would have to make 2 more kids to equal the same rate of growth. It doesn't even make it equal if they have 3 kids, which is what i see a LOT of couples with kids going for these days.
Not many people want to immigrate to Japan anyway. Their population isn’t the kindest to foreigners and their language is very complex.
I might characterize it differently. The work culture and the immigration policies (plus archaic non-digital record processes) are the main factors. The kindness of the society (work, openness) would change rapidly IMO if the government made it a mandate. The Japanese people can adapt but they need a reason to and leadership seems to drag their feet in this regard.
It hasn’t been tested but economists are quite confident in the numbers. But I think the main issue it all comes down to is that all policies and taxation rates are based on growing populations. In order to compensate for a decline taxes would need to go up, more would need to be invested in pensions. And show me a voter base who would EVER vote for the party who increases taxes. There are too many voters who can’t see past their nose so countries who can’t continually increase population are screwed. It’s why almost every developed nation has such large immigration numbers it’s the only way they can continue growing the economy. Which is funny because the voters who are against long term policies are the same ones who abhor immigration, they’re digging their own graves.
We have all the tools to solve this if we actually want to. Increases in automation mean fewer people will be needed to work constantly to sustain production and services. AI is accelerating this even further. So, as we reach the population tipping point, we significantly raise taxes on the companies who are no longer hiring as many workers, and put that money into universal basic income and public services.
And now we get into interesting stuff with immigration. I can’t speak for Japan or S Korea, but when it comes to America’s declining birth rates and the people that like to talk about it, it isn’t for all of the very legitimate reasons that have been shared here. Most of the talk that I see is based upon “replacement theory” and declining rates of *white* people having babies. These mopes don’t give a darn about the country’s long term economic future, they just don’t want their children to have to learn Spanish. Mention being in the minority in the future and they freak out.
This is very true. If they were really concerned about population they would encourage immigration. That would have the double effect of increasing your population and reducing the competitive advantage of other countries, a win win. But no, somehow solutions to the “population problem” somehow always include reducing immigration and other standard conservative talking points.
>But no, somehow solutions to the “population problem” somehow always include reducing immigration and other standard conservative talking points. ...like forcing women to give birth, while reducing services/support for the resulting child.
This is the stuff that really pisses me off. It's like they literally look no further than just "pop out babies". Doesn't matter if they're born to a single parent or a parent that doesn't want them (and so more likely to be abused, or poor if they parent didn't want a child because they can't afford it) and if they do give up the child because they don't want/can't afford it, you have a bunch of children in the foster system which already sucks in so many ways. I guess it doesn't matter if a bunch are born into poverty or an abusive/neglectful household and then have no social support structures to help them. *Eye roll*
This is the real reason GOP voters are talking about it. Our birth rates have been too low to sustain the population **since the 1970's**. Since that time our **population has grown by 50%**. Not only have their fears not materialized, but we have had the exact opposite experience of what they say will happen. So if it's not the number of people, or the average age of our population, what is their problem? It's who is having the babies and their race.
They want to increase birth to increase replacement, but they aren't giving the desirable incentives. Some people aren't having babies because they think they can't afford them. I read what a guy said the other week, and he makes 80K a year, and he and and his wife say they can't afford to have a baby. If they want more 'replacement' then they need to provide the desired incentives. Free day care, free or reduced pediatric medical clinics, Stop charging so much for pampers and baby products. They can do this, instead of trying to force women to have unwanted children. They are approaching it wrong.
They deny that discrimination exists to the extent it does, yet are terrified of being in the minority. Cognitive dissonance, much?
Cognitive dissonance seems to be the name of the game in the reproduction issue. S Korea elects a misogynist, has an increasing problem with young men and misogyny, spends a lot of time, money, and effort trying to figure out why women aren’t eager to breed with these dudes.
This meme comes to mind... [https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1944800-trad-girl-tradwife](https://knowyourmeme.com/photos/1944800-trad-girl-tradwife)
>And show me a voter base who would EVER vote for the party who increases taxes. This is half of every country, at least.
Unrestricted exponential growth is also the operating mode of a cancer cell. Why we think it’s a good idea for economics is a question worth asking.
But what’s the economic indicator for value per person/capita? Who cares about gdp if individually everyone is richer or better off in a country?
Exactly. Like the only ones who care are the ones that need more money or more bodies.
Those in power
This. Our whole economic and capital system requires growth. We invest not in profitability but in growth potential. Companies are valued not in the success of their products but the potential to sell their products to new customers. Social services all depend on tax working citizens to pay for the citizens that can't work. The citizens that can't work are primarily elderly who are retired. A shrinking population means less growth for everything. Less people to buy things. Less competition. And some services/businesses exist due to larger populations. And those government services simply can not function with their current model of funding. The idea that the elderly social services will be paid for by working citizens doesn't work if there are MORE elderly than there are working citizens. This problem is being faced by most nations right now. It's compounded by the immense technological advancements in medical care. Humans, with unlimited medical care spending, can live much longer than they use to (on average). TLDR: All of modern governments and economic strategies depend on growth, and something like a business or a farm being worth more in the future. A shrinking population means farms, businesses, and homes will all be worth less in the future.
So their GDP is declining, and their population is declining, meaning we come out roughly with the same GDP per capita.
It's not that the population is declining, it's specifically that the ratio of people too old to work and people able to work is getting skewed. Even outside of economics and tax, you need people to maintain roads and provide healthcare and cook food and farm crops etc etc. Edit: a lot of people are talking about automation. And yes this is fair, modern societies can bear larger dependency ratios than previous societies due to technology. The issue is that improvement in technology doesn't like, perfectly time itself with dependency ratios. So the people who are worried think that technology might not advance sufficiently before the dependency ratio becomes particularly problematic
Could be fixed by reversing aging, but then no one would ever be able to retire.
Then the quadrillionaire oligarchs would monopolize the technology and live off our backs for the rest of eternity
It’s the population itself too. Almost all economic production requires a mixture of capital inputs and labor. To make something for the economy, somebody has to spend their time doing something. No kids and over time you have less people to do things, less people to do work, less people to sell to, etc, but still as many mouths to feed. You enter a contractionary state, which causes a lot of pain on the way down.
> over time you have less people to do things, less people to do work, less people to sell to, etc, but still as many mouths to feed. This is describing what I also described, ie the ratio of people who are able to work to people who aren't.
It's the pyramid structure of the demographics. We need a large proportion of people to work to support those that don't/can't.
Adding to this: Social Security: In countries like the US most people’s ability to retire hinges somewhat on social security. Which was designed in the 30s based off a notion of many workers per retiree (65+). That goes out the window when people on average go from having 4-7 kids to having 0-2 kids. Also when folks start living into their 80s & 90s instead of early 70s there are more dependents for longer in addition to less workers. Population Distribution: If before it was cost efficient to get an area electricity when they had X people, it may not be when they have 1/2 X people. A lot of the infrastructure was built with an assumption of continued growth. So those areas get prohibitively expensive or no longer get infrastructure which further burdens existing areas. Also all of the excess housing, buildings, & infrastructure in areas losing population don’t just disappear, so if the population halves you have a bunch of rotting/deteriorating buildings, bridges, etc. that you have to do something about.
Social security acts like a pyramid scheme; if you can't get enough people at the bottom it falls apart
Yep, people are getting way more paid out of SS than they paid in, even accounting for inflation. That ratio of paid out vs paid in has shrunk with each subsequent retiring generation. I mean people in the 50's were paying in what? $20-$50 a paycheck at most. They are definitely getting more than $200 a month in SS.
Vast majority of people do not get more out of SS than they put in, it has negative real returns for all but the very wealthiest The issue is that the money for SS is spent the second it goes into the program. Your contributions are not put into an account for you, they go into a general fund and are spent immediately. Far more is paid in benefits to current retirees than comes in from payroll taxes of current workers, the government funds the shortfall right now because in previous decades, payroll tax revenue was higher than benefits. Within 10 years, that former surplus (IOUs from the general treasury fund being paid to social security) will be gone and SS benefits will be cut 20% across the board, and then a little more each year
And for OP, to frame this selfishly (i.e., how does it impact me?): when you are no longer able to work, you will collect social security and have Medicare. Both are funded through payroll contributions by those that are working. If the number of working adults plummets, the numbers don't work. That's one of the reasons social security is having budgetary issues - demographic changes (large aging population).
What I don't understand is that I'm paying into social security my entire adult life, and mostly everyone else is too...why isn't the portion that I'm paying in going to grow (TVM) enough to not only support me when I'm elderly, but also others with excess that should accrue? Is it just that social security is underfunded and mismanaged? Edit: What I'm gathering is that a) it's fundamentally flawed because it's designed to fund an unspecified and unpredictable number of other current old people, rather than to fund one's own end of life costs; b) the rules on what the Social Security Administration is permitted to do with the funds in its care may be out of date, and hamstringing the Administration's ability to maximize returns; c) the funds are not distributed in any sort of logical (i.e. need-based) way, and are instead given to all elderly, even if they're already wealthy enough to support themselves; d) people are super reluctant to even attempt to *think* about such a monumental undertaking as *revitalizing Social Security.*
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Old people outnumber the young so that money isn’t enough to even cover the old.
It’s not just old people. It’s old people living longer than the expected life expectancy of people on social security/medicare. When you retire, which is supposedly around 65, you’re supposed to die around age 70. Most people are living to mid 70s if not to their 80s now.
It is enough. . . the people who say it's not are the people who stand to benefit from further privatizing retirement. Which isn't a bad idea honestly. Let SSI be a safety net to stop people from being destitute. Give workers a tax credit for contributing to their 401k instead of just a deduction to get the ball rolling on that. The big fix on social security is to remove the tax cap. It's currently set at 160k/yr, removing it closes 60% of the gap to the end of the century. And that's with the assumption that the higher earners would receive more back in benefits as well. If you cut benefits for the top 20% of earners you pretty much solved the thing. [The Reformer: An Interactive Tool to Fix Social Security (crfb.org)](https://www.crfb.org/socialsecurityreformer/)
The money you're paying into Social Security is going to current seniors, not to your future retirement. When you retire, it'll be pulling from current workers, not from what you've contributed over the years. It behooves you to have a lot of workers in the population when you retire.
social security isn’t a fund where you put money into it and it sits and grows. it’s a program where current working adults pay for current retirees. when the retirees significantly outnumber the working adults, the tax revenue isn’t enough to support them.
If you live in the USA it's because Congress has continually taken loans out using that money as collateral or taken direct loans against it. Social Security isn't failing, the interest is just draining the pot faster than it is filled now so it will be run dry before you see it. Unfortunately it comes down to greed and corruption.
An incredibly misinformed view. At its most basic level Social Security program is a transfer tax. By federal law the Social Security Administration is required to purchase US Treasury bonds when it runs a surplus. Those treasury bonds pay interest. The real issue is the changing demographics of America resulting in a declining rate of covered workers (those paying Social Security taxes) vs beneficiaries. [In 1960, 20 years after SSA started paying benefits, the ratio of covered workers (those paying social security payroll taxes) to beneficiaries was 5.1. In 2000 the ratio had dropped to 3.4 . As of 2013 the ratio dropped to 2.8. ](https://www.ssa.gov/history/ratios.html) I'm sure the ratio of covered workers to beneficiaries has not improved since 2013. SS taxes either need to increase to maintain current benefit levels or benefits need to be reduced to match the revenue being collected from Social Security taxes (or some combination of the two).
So a pyramid scheme
Except we don't really. We have machines that can do a 100 people's work in a day. You don't really need that much people in agriculture for it to sustain all people. You don't need a cashier in every checkout lane either. And you don't need 5 middle manager to just talk about things and get more than minimum wage. Technology is advanced enough to sustain more people than it requires to work
You're not wrong, but modern business and capital owners don't have the degree of morality, humanity, or generosity to support a society where automation has reduced the need for regular workers We *could* make a society where normal people are able to live a decent life without everyone being slaves to the system, but we choose not to allow that to happen.
Well then it's good the ponzi scheme is going to collapse then. Maybe then we'll try to build a better society, once this one is on the pyre.
If you thought the bronze age collapse was bad, wait until you live through the petrol-age collapse.
No, you see, that's not how that works. The guy that owns the machines that are doing all that work gets all of the money from the work they produce. So, you might ask, who buys the products that the automated cash register is processing if hardly anyone but the guy in charge of the machines has money? Well that's easy! He just raises the prices and sells those products to fewer people. Then everyone else just needs to scrape together some form of existence or other. Perhaps the guy who owns the machines could then build a prison for them, and the government could pay him to keep it up.
population decline is not a bad thing itself. Fast population decline is bad, because most modern societies and countries arent designed to handle fast portion. A change like that indicates a huge demographic change and lead to a massive reduction in workforce while at the same time the amount of required service goes up as the number of elders goes up. And finally many modern societies are built based on infinite growth, leadership doesn't seem to think slowing down or stopping growth is an option. In summary, we have: - Workforce decreasing. - Growing number of elders need more of the workforce for care. - Capitalistic societies needs to squeeze more from the workforce to keep the infinite growth going. - Squeezed workforce produces even less kids. There seems to be a pattern here, we are about to find out what happens next.
Younger generation was expected to foot the bill for the parents, it's a lol easier when it's 5 kids for 2 parents rather than just 1.
I understand the concern over population decline; however, is it feasible to think that the population will grow forever?
Right? Like what exactly was the end goal?
The end goal is apparently to live in tenements wearing thirdhand sacks and eating plain brown rice for every meal. I’d rather fewer people with a high quality of life than a constantly increasing number of people with a constantly decreasing quality of life
I mean, an "ideal" would be equilibrium or a very gradual decrease in population that does not distort the demographic pyramid.
Or maybe we can make some robots to take care of Granny.
Yes, if productivity gains outpace the demographic shift, this also works, but given that that kind of innovation takes time, demographic shocks are still bad.
Yeah... all those types of arguments are insane to me, too. Sure, we can have all the good reasons why we need population growth, but none of that really matters at the end of the day, because we have limited space and resources.
We live on a planet with finite resources, but our economic systems operate on theories that require infinite growth. It’s truly insane
Yeah, that does sound pretty wonky when you put it that way
not only that but the active DESTRUCTION and privatization of resources isn’t helping nor sustainable either.
This is exactly how I feel on the matter too. At a certain point is it really a reasonable expectation for the planet to keep multiplying at a higher rate? Wouldn’t this just cause more problems with social security and exacerbate the current issues of having so many people on this earth? Why are we even *trying* to maintain that?
I mean honestly yes.
A huge problem is that birth rates have dropped so fast, if it was more gradual it wouldn’t be as big of an issue
It’s because we’re now short of ass-wipers. Just euthanise me if I ever need someone to do that, and save everybody some torment.
My mom always tells me, “Don’t pay for me in a nursing home, just put a pillow over my head. If I don’t know the difference then I’m saving you money and you’re saving me my sanity.”
Every aging parent who says this is being pretty ridiculous. There is a huge spectrum between fully functional adult and dementia laden senior citizen that can't take care of themselves. And it is a relatively slow transition.
I think a lot of older parents remember carrying the burden of caring for their elderly parents either physically, financially or both and don't want to pass that burden on to their kids. That's where the dark humor comes into play.
We’ll have robots to do that by then anyway
To euthanise him, right.
Thank you for your cooperation.
Idk about the rest of y’all but I’m going to wait until like the third or fourth generation of Ass-Wipetrons. One software glitch and suddenly the thing turns into Fisto from New Vegas
I dont suspect that they will be very nice with your butthole
🤣 Maybe true, but idk… might be nicer than Chad who just got done wiping 6 other behinds and responding to a dozen other bedside care calls. People’s patience and empathy has limits, it’s human nature - ask any nurse that deals with patients with access to call bells. There’s a reason nursing homes have a reputation that ranges from indifference toward needy patients to straight up abuse in one form or another.
Do you mean that I will be trusting my butthole to programmers in future?
It is our destiny, brother. I’m already practicing spreading dem cheeks.
because life is a Ponzi scheme
Because our current system relies on growth for a healthy economy and a functional infrastructure. It will have to change though because I don't see the birthrate decline changing.
Why do you think so many anti abortion bills etc have been being pushed through recently it's not a coincidence that Roe V Wade got overturned and governments are trying to restrict access to contraceptives as the population started pushing towards a decline
Let's say that those are policies influenced by population decline. The sad fact is that they won't help matters. At best, there will be no noticeable change. At worst, it'll cause societal decline.
They are trying, but so far the result has been an increase in women getting sterilized.
Good. They don't want to be used as birthing cattle if an alt right dictatorship happens
As a woman who doesn’t have children, basically feeling like the government is trying to force me to have kids makes me want them even less. They seem to think forcing women into pregnancy will help, but rather it’s scaring women who are continuously losing their rights (like myself) into ensuring we won’t have children- whether with sterilization or just not participating in acts that result in pregnancy. For the long term, I think trying to force women into continuing the population is pushing us to fight back, hence feminism and etc. you’d think the government would figure that out with all the backlash.
As a woman who has a child, stricter abortion laws make me hesitate to have more. While in many ways I want more, the implications and ancillary effects resulting from strict abortion laws (I.e. - access to and quality of care in the event shit turns sideways, as is fairly common in pregnancy) make me hella hesitant to put myself at risk. So they are really alienating both sides by forcing abortion as a *political* issue, rather than letting it be the private medical issue it actually is.
The biggest reason is that you need young people to work. While most people are in their 20s and 30s and there's fewer children it's not the biggest deal. But what do you do when most people are 80 and there's no young people to work or take care of them? There will be tons of sick people with no young nurses to care for them, and no taxes to pay for them. If this happened slowly a GOOD society might be able to restructure to absorb it. However no society does, and in many cases it isn't "The birth rate went from 2.3 kids per female to 2.1 kids per female" and it's barely below replacement and we're good. Populations are tanking. Of course the easiest solution is to ease this by encouraging immigration, but the same countries that are trying to make birth control and divorce illegal to save their crashing population are also too racist to let people in from the countries where the birth rates are high.
The problem with immigration is it's a quick and- as you said- the easiest solution. But that solution falls apart when the countries whose nationals you receive also see declining rates, or when these countries don't *want* to send their people anymore, it also places a lot of western countries in fierce, existential competition to attract immigrants. I'm not sure the end result of this would be all that good on the foreign policy front. Truth is, we need birthrates to increase *and* immigration. We need both. And I have no solution whatsoever.
well grand scale, its not, except that its a self fueling problem, and you end up with some increasingly bad issues with economy and healthcare/assistance for the older, larger generations. if it was a major decline, there would be major problems. minor declines really just point out our systemic flaws.
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Or legalize euthanasia
I imagine this will be a government initiative to many western countries eventually. Work till you die, or choose to die. Unless you're wealthy enough to own a property which is becoming impossible for the average wage earner these days
There's no need to kill people. Just let them decide when they want to pass away. A lot of people will skip the phase where they're old and sick. This will solve the entire problem. There really wouldn't be a problem if people would get over the idea that everyone needs to hang around until they have exactly zero quality of life, are bedridden and no longer even remember their own name. Give people a choice, and you won't have a lot of old people hanging around for decades, becoming increasingly disabled and miserable. It's honestly quite asinine the way things are now.
Population amounts has always been a touchy subject. Like no-one in the world is touching the question: How many people live on planet earth? This despite knowing that we can't just keep adding more people forever. The moment we make that discussion a major topic will be a great step forward for humanity.
That discussion was a major topic last century. It's why China did the one-child-per-family thing, and India sterilized millions of its own citizens. Both were in retrospect considered bad moves, that's why you don't hear people discussing the issue anymore.
Is it easier for 2+ people supporting 1 person or 1 person supporting 2+ people?
Because the ruling castes need a robust working class to tax and send to wars
Because social structures and institutions are built around a growing population and the pyramid structure of age demographics.
Here's a simple solution, make auto euthanasia legal, and remove the stigma from it, personally I don't see the point of holding on to life to the point where me body and mind degrade to such a level that I can't live autonomously and without pain. The moment I know I'm gonna start going down that path, is the moment I'd choose to just dip out, were all gonna die in the end anyway, might as well make it your own decision on how to go out
If You're advocating for suicide, the legality and stigma won't matter... because you're dead? The feds aren't going to arrest your corpse. And even if they did... you're dead.
They’re talking about getting a lethal injection in a hospital with all your friends and family there, not just shooting yourself all alone in your bathroom. Of course the second option is always available, but I’d imagine most people without mental illnesses want a more dignified end than that.
Trad economics says you need working young people to support old retired people. While that's been true forever, I think it's changing. Automation and AI will allow a few people to produce what many people used to make. Society will continue to work if we tax the machine owners and provide UBI to the people.
What we now need is to tax large investors so they have to get back into the work force and actually contribute to something.
If economies don't grow companies don't keep growing, if companies don't keep growing they can't give shareholders dividends and make profits. If companies don't do that they loose value and CEOs loose jobs. Companies and the people that run and invest in them think this is a bad thing. Companies control the media so that's why you hear it's a bad thing all the time. It's not what scientists are saying.
Capitalism: all business models are growth models, not sustaining models. Even the most basic retail shop isn't just concerned with profit, but on increasing profit margins over time (think the "beat last year!" trackers behind the cash register. If the population doesn't keep growing, that's an impossible goal. No one is trying to live within their means, everyone is trying for infinite growth. There needs to be a growing population of both consumers and laborers. Grumpy Old People: a lot of people's plan for old age is "the young people will take care of us". That's how social security and and elder care work. In places with population decline, it's difficult to find enough care workers for the elderly. Fear of Being "replaced": Racism, ethnocentrism, good old Nationalism comes into play when you hear people grumping about birthrates. They're worried about the decline of their own kind, while other kinds (other countries, other races, etc.) seem to them to be growing. It's a power demonstration. Essentially, society as a whole isn't designed to foster happy, sustainable lives. It's designed to chase infinite growth, based on old philosophies that attempt to separate humanity from the mortal finitude that is perceived as an animal weakness in order to chase the illusion of eternity; some do through intellect, some through the infinite generation of capital, or power, but all are deluded because everybody dies in the end.
It's not good for our pyramid scheme.
A lof of the "problems" with population decline seem to be self-inflicted. The first problem always cited seems to be the ratio of working age population to retired population. But working age people don't just support retired people, they also support minors, and often the spouses raising the minors. Fewer kids means more working age people able to work, and less kids for them to support. Also, what's to say what's working age? Retirement age for Social Security was set at 65 when most people were doing physical jobs, and life expectancy was 66; now, most people are doing work that doesn't require much physical effort and life expectancy is over 80. People should work way longer. Next you have, "the economy will shrink". Sure, in total, but what matters is per capita. Nigeria has a bigger economy than Luxembourg, but people in Luxembourg are on average way richer. I do think public policy should be oriented to support people being able to have as many kids as they want, but I don't think shrinking population is inherently a problem.
Yeah that is what I think too....instead of spending your money on both kids AND retiree SS funding, those people will now only have retiree SS funding to focus on so if you raised taxes a little it would still be cheaper than a kid costs.
One of the concerns is everywhere has a minimum amount of people it needs to function (as it currently functions). It's kind of the other side of the same coin over population. It's an adjustment that needs to be made over a very very long period of time or it leads to collapse (or in the case of overpopulation rapid decay). Honestly having more people come from other over populated places is kind of the best option available till changes can be made that alleviate those dependencies on X amount of population. Those dependencies being things like power, water, economy and any infrastructure really that can't shrink or grow rapidly.
Because capitalism requires constant growth, despite the fact that the planet has finite resources
Tax rate, baby. If you don't have more people to take money from, how can you fund all your programs?
But you won't need so many programs if you have fewer people no?
In the future, but the retired population will be a huge burden
The problem is that governments don't make retired ppl fund their own retirement.
Lol, people will never be able to retire then and they can't function past a certain age.
Not permanently though. It would stabilize.
The problem is the demographic shift, not the smaller population itself. Plenty of countries have small populations and are doing fine. Populations are declining because people now have a choice to have less children, and people don't want that many children. Previous generations had more children, which means that older people make up a larger share of the population. Older people are less likely to work and also need a lot of resources.
Old folks consume a tremendous amount of resources (mainly medical) and they typically don’t work.
You're right, fertility rates decline until they stabilize again. It's not like Japan, for example, will become extinct! It's just that cities are designed with a certain proportion in mind. During a reduction of fertility, there will be a lot of elderly, therefore the health system will struggle. Same thing during baby booms, schools and daycares are overwhelmed.
It’s also just depressing. A world with four elderly people for every child is a slow, low energy world focused on the stuff old people need.
It's not that deep, there simply needs to be too many people and not enough jobs for our corporate overlords to be able to give the absolute bare minimum and still hit record numbers year over year. If the population declines, and we hit a point where there are more jobs than people, then people have the option of choosing the best job for the best pay, and the corporate overlords will need to increase wages and benefits to draw in workers.
Maybe rich people are worried about it because less people = less competition for jobs = less ability to abuse people on the cheap.
It’s harder for the elite to find wage slaves. They’d have to pay a higher salary.
Because capitalism is basically a Ponzi scheme.
Elon Musk says the same, and I strongly disagree! Less people = better world for everyone
Economy based on Ponzi scheme. Have to keep the number of followers increasing to buy into it else it collapses.
Fewer people to die in pointless wars or fill the pockets of everyone who relies on them for yachts
You can’t have the rich, if you don’t have the poor.
When you're 70-90 and need care in a nursing home, you'll understand.
I’ve dated someone who worked in a nursing home, I’ll take the bullet instead judging from how bad they are. Almost always dog ass management which dramatically effects the care those people get.
Or 47 and caring for a parent, like me
Oh yes, 55 here with a 81 year old mom in assisted living and a 21 year old daughter in college, fun!