Low birth rates are a crisis for capitalism, not humanity. And if you count brown countries, it’s not even happening.
Pension schemes are not a biological imperative.
Just for clarification, if we’re talking about sub replacement fertility rates then it would be “brown countries” except for India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Iran, Lebanon, UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, Brazil, Mexico, Chile, Argentina, Costa Rica and Cuba and more. Might be an invalid generalization now.
Right now, a crisis for capitalism is a crisis for all of us, because that’s where we live.
Maybe addressing the source of the problem is a better strategy than trying to blame the symptoms?
Sure, and maybe it’s part of what pushes us to something better, but to act like it won’t have effects is not helpful.
Infinite growth of human population would hit a hard ceiling on earth resources real soon.
People not having babies is a good thing.
I agree. I chose not to have kids for various reasons. And my “skilled” lol trade skills will die with me.
Right on. The way the way population is right now, every time a chunk of mountain or glacier falls down, or a river floods, tens of thousands die or are displaced.
In 1960 there were 2-3 billion people on the planet. Now it’s 3x as many cars, mouths to feed, homes to heat/cool.
In Bangladesh there are over 1 million Rohingan refugees who’ve been there for TEN YEARS. They can’t work there, have no country to move to, have to live on $6-12 a month for food.
Yes, this IS fine. There’s too many people on this fucking planet. The only reason this is considered a problem is because capitalism and the Bible says so.
No other reason. Period.
Since more people in the world are in China and India you are probably wrong about it being the Bible. It is religious texts that encourage more reproduction for religious spreading to the masses and China just has more landmass so more people overall
There’s too many people on this fucking planet.
There’s really not. The human ecological footprint changes enormously by region. Relatively small populations in countries like Qatar and Brunei punch well outside their weight class in terms of ecological devestation.
A much smaller population that lived at this degree of pollution and destruction would be no better globally.
There’s really not. The human ecological footprint changes enormously by region. Relatively small populations in countries like Qatar and Brunei punch well outside their weight class in terms of ecological devestation.
Yeah, uh, the oil produced by those small populations is used in places like China, Europe and Australia too. In fact they export most of their oil, so we all share that blame.
Sounds like a situation that will self correct in a few decades, no?
Unless there’s some horrible disaster in the coming decades that will kill billions and harm wealthy old people less.
Not really, unless Gen Z starts having a fuckload of babies soon. Because each generation will be progressively smaller if the fertility rates don’t rise.
It’s not a huge issue in the third world where your kids are your retirement plan anyway so they have a ton more children. In the developed world, we have pension systems and stuff so on an individual level, having kids is likely bad for you financially, you want other people to have kids so you don’t have to spend a bunch of money raising them, but their taxes pay for your retirement.
Just funnel money from billionaires into it and problem solved. We can keep the aame money in circulation, half the population, and be fine. I see no issue with lowering birth rates, and wvery issue with a lack of policy changes surrounding it
Technically, probably yes, one way or another…
So what’s your alternative? Infinite growth?
Good. There are too many people. Why do we want to expand on a 7billion+ population when so many of us are struggling? How about we only have as many people as we have resources for everyone having a good life?
I’m not arguing for population growth but we definitely have more than enough resources for everyone now. Scarcity isn’t the problem, it’s that we allow people to hoard those resources and we waste a ton of them.
When we can prove it by providing everyone the same (good) standard of life, across the entire world, then I’ll believe it.
Stuff like everyone has housing, clean safe water, safe to eat food, able to escape from extreme climate swings, healthcare, vacation, parental leave, and I’m sure lots more that I’m not thinking of.
Once everyone has that, then we can look at what we can expand on
“We have enough resources” is such a shitty god damned argument. At least you didn’t go “hurr durr everyone on the planet can fit in Manhattan if they just squeeze tightly”.
But god damned ask yourself what kind of world you want to live in, not min maxxing the number of people alive for some absolutely incomprehensible reason.
“WE CAN SQUEEZE ONE MORE IN THERE, BOYS! SHE CAN TAKE IT!”
For WHAT?! WHY?!
everyone on the planet can fit in Manhattan if they just squeeze tightly
But god damned ask yourself what kind of world you want to live in, not min maxxing the number of people alive for some absolutely incomprehensible reason.
Totally with you on these points. Having lived in NYC it is my conception of ultra-urban hell. Sure, there are worse places. Cairo comes to mind. But this idea that we just have to warehouse people to keep them from having massive sprawling impact on the planet is absolutely the most wrong way to think about it, IMO. I hate when people argue that if we just tighten our belts and accept a lower standard of living, everyone can be accommodated with low environmental impact. I go the other way: if there were few enough people (and hoarding/profiteering was curtailed), beachfront and slopeside real estate would be cheap.
You people, I swear. I said specifically that I’m not arguing for increased population and yet your whole response is structured like that’s exactly what I said we should do. Do you even read what you respond to or do you just scan until you find the right key word to launch into a rant?
Did I miss something? You said it is a “shitty” argument, but you never state what is wrong with it.
Not me, but I think that the fundamental argument is quality / quantity.
The quantity side aligns with capitalism and growth for the sake of growth. More consumers. More labor. Supporting the top-heavy aging populace (admittedly a problem) by whatever means necessary. Quantity is an argument favoring people not yet born, or favoring a pyramid scheme by which there needs to be an ever-expanding base of young, productive people to support the old. Nonexistent people’s “wants” should not be considered in any way. If they are not born, they can not suffer. We should not consider what hypothetical people might have wanted. The elderly need to be supported, but by some other means. We cannot continue growth forever simply to support all those who came before us.
The quality side is benefit for the existing populace. As a person who exists, it’s basically the only thing I care about. I prefer my quality of life over sacrifice for the potential existence of not-yet-existent lives. I think any sane person would want there to be more quality of life for themselves and other people living. Quantity of life directly impedes this goal.
The previous poster may not have stated the case as such, but I believe that it is self-evident.
Well if we could make everyone have a good quality of life and not destroy the environment and at the same time have more people to enjoy life and to help drive innovation and art, it would generally be for the better.
I don’t think you comprehend exactly how large a number 7 billion actually is. There’s plenty of innovation and art potential already.
Currently a good portion of those people are barely surviving and don’t have bandwidth for art or effective innovation. But that’s not really the point. If people are happy and have a good quality of life, and there’s no negatives, then more is better because it’s more happiness.
I’m not arguing against concentration of wealth and hoarding by the ultra-rich, which is obviously a problem, but I have said recently: everyone could live like a modern-day billionaire if there were fewer people.
Too often the argument pivots the other way and turns into: if we all eat plants, live in ultradense cities with dystopian warehousing of people, and nobody has a car, we could be in ecological harmony with 8B+ people. I don’t like that angle.
If “Westerners”, or “the global North”, or “developed countries” are consuming more than “our fair share” of resources while some significant fraction of the 8B+ humans are in poverty, that’s not ideal. On the other hand I want my standard of living to increase, not decrease, and I find making concessions a hard sell.
would it be better if the population was growing past 9bn?
There’s a stable population the ecosystem can support and I’m pretty sure 9bn is too fuckin many.
not that I’m volunteering to free up space tho… there’s a whole lot of techbro chuds who think there’s way too many people, but their motivations are pretty genocidal tbh.
honestly we’re fucked in either direction, but I suspect there’s a lot of reasons the population total will go down once the climate crisis starts shifting millions of people around.
yes growth would be better for me so there are more young people to support the old people
I don’t have enough to give so much to old people
more young people to support the old people
But human labor is incredibly efficienct in the modern day. You don’t need ten young people for every one old person - nine of whom die by their mid-30s - so that everyone doesn’t starve.
But the role of elderly people has changed so much in the last century. On a national scale, they’re no longer master craftsmen or child caregivers or elder advisors. They’re just the base of the consumer economy and the electoral pool.
As democracy fails and the economy becomes more fixated on tech capital than quality of life, they’re marked out as increasingly expendable.
It isn’t that we need more young people so much as we’ve alienated and de-skilled our old people.
Your old people don’t really need any skills when they own most of the economy. People over 55 own 52% of everything in the US. And that’s how retirement works, whether you have a government as a middle man via taxes or the old people have their investments, they have to live off the backs of the young. The investments, after all, are mostly ownership of companies that the young people work for. Companies that do their best not to raise wages so the shareholders (boomers) can have a better retirement.
If people want to retire in their 60s, there needs to be growth happening all the time, until we’ve entirely gotten rid of the need for human labor.
selfish prick wants the population to grow so he has more servants at the nursing home
Oh no, who did this? (sarcasm. a few people have gone out of their way to ensure everyone else’s suffering)
It’ll be fine. The baby boom our grandparents cane from was an anomaly
The US baby boom is not really meaningful on a global scale
Sure, but only the inner lips of the labia matter
Minora supremacist
Baby boomers also had more kids than the generation that preceded them. So did Gen X. Millennials are the first to fail to even replace their own population.
They’re slow off the mark, averaging 27-28 for the first child rather than 22.
I am so glad I didn’t knock up who I thought I was forever with in my 20s or 30s. I would be even more miserable now and would have miserable people depending on me.
exactly. People in Asia, north america , nd europe arent having kids cause most of them are like me and you.
We realize that we would just have more miserable dependants while we ourselves are still miserable. Band aid babies wont fix how shitty our economies and monotonous lives are. The economy doesnt work for most people who dont have tons of wealth so why should we ‘The Poors’ create more sad and suicidal slaves and soldiers for this disgsusting monotonous economy? ( Why have we not rebelled yet? is the question that plagues myind even more to be honest…)
Ive got my vasectomy snd I plan on s taying snipped until we can create a world where being miserable is practically an unknown emotion for most people. Well truth be told Im still a 31 year old virgin but if I ever change my mind about having kids? HELL NYAH am I bringing in another slave to suffer through half the nonsense I have , I am adopting instead, amd dont care what anyone says.
Karma for them being dicks.
they’re hiring caregivers like crazy in my state
Unionizing opportunity.
Ha, and then they will continue to pay them shit and then fire everyone. The us is not union compatible with current us labour laws.
I mean they should still do it, but paying jobs are thin enough that there will always be scabs.
Not just fine, good.
I don’t owe the future anything.
I don’t give a fuck if our species survives. Why should I?
Everything ends someday.
The issue is we don’t just go straight from point A to B, rather there’s a long period of suffering.
Well for one, I hope you don’t plan to take out any form of retirement or invest in the stock market, including via index funds, because that’s leeching off the productivity of young people in the future.
It’s immoral to leech off other people’s children tax money, sure.
But also no one wants to be a sucker doing 20+ years of unpaid labor raising kids, so someone else 's S&P 500 keeps growing and sustains a very comfortable retirement plan, and no one will even help you with raising kids anymore.
It’s really the system’s fault, not individuals. It makes it lucrative for every individual human to give as little back, and take as much from everyone else.
It is indeed fine. In 1900 there were about 1.6 milliard people, versus the 8.3 today.
Oh no we are running out of people!
ok let’s revolt before it’s too late for the planet then?
