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.
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
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.
Just waiting for Jesus?
In a pretty abstract sense, yes, and it gives me peace.
How to say you don’t understand sustainability without saying you don’t understand it. :-)
I don’t think youth outnumber old are sign of good thing either, but you do you.
Even at constant population or even mildly declining, you would expect the young to outnumber the old by a bit. Given people die on the way to getting old and die whole being old more than the young die.
They may be even fewer than when the currently old folks when they were young but still be expected to outnumber the old
Why would anyone make a kid is beyond me. More mear for future wars, for warehouses and factories, forcing a life into being just for suffering and misery
So what’s your alternative? Infinite growth?
Term limits on life.
Limits on wealth.
Not even close to true
Its really only Africa that bucks the trend if you Iook region by region.
well 1 out of 23 humans checking to see if random internet claims are true is better odds than i expected, well done sir
If you select North America and slide the slider between 2050 and 2080 it looks like a face opening their mouth and screaming.
Maybe true if you’re comparing 60+ to under 5
1950’s America with that flared base!
Oh no, who did this? (sarcasm. a few people have gone out of their way to ensure everyone else’s suffering)
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.
While I half agree with you, that’s definitely not the only issue.
Senior citizens become people to take care of, that won’t/can’t work and I don’t mean that in a “dear God consider the GDP” way, but literally just people who will not be contributing but still require services, in fact likely a lot more than normal.
It ends up being a lot of neglected senior citizens dying in horrible ways.
Senior citizens become people to take care of,
Children need more resources to raise than seniors take.
Not really. The unique expense for a kid is education compared to the old, and elder care can easily eclipse that.
Cost per child is $300k, $400k including college. The state (which means workers’ taxes) chip in an average of $17k / year for k-12 which is another $200k. That’s $600k per child, not including the free labor from the parents.
The average savings for someone 65-74 is $200k. End of life costs are $155k for the last 3 years.
I suppose if you are just thinking about things like cost of formula, diapers, clothes, education. In terms of time spent, children take less and less one on one time as each year passes. They have a finite timeline of required care.
The elderly become less and less independant, the care they require becomes more and more medical in nature, and there is no timeline. Someone with dementia can require around the clock medical care for decades.
Yes, the medical care is 1000x more than cost of food and things.
An infant requires more constant care than a dying elderly. Parents are on rotation 24/7 for the first year. That’s more than elderly get in hospice.
Moneywise it’s $600k for a child. $400k from parents. $200k from the state for the free k-12 education.
Elderly on average have $200k in savings age 65-74 and spend $155k in medical costs their last 3 years.
Children are more expensive in money and direct labor.
Not with modern lifespans, 75-95 take a ton of care and are unable to contribute
Average 64-75 have $200k savings and spend $155k for last 3 years.
A child takes $600k. ($300k from parents. $100k college. $200k paid by state to cover the free k-12.)
yes and theres more old poeple than children, thats like, the whole point of the post??
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
ok let’s revolt before it’s too late for the planet then?
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.
Not really anything to do with capitalism. If the ratio of workers to non-workers decreases without a proportionate increase in productivity, a higher proportion of workers’ time has to be spent catering to the needs of non-workers. That means less time spent not working and/or less time spent producing unnecessary stuff that improves our lives like chocolate or TV shows.
We grow several times more food than humanity can possibly eat. We don’t have a productivity or resource shortage. We have an allocation error.
I don’t think this is true. I checked the stats for caloric supply and the highest value worldwide is (unsurprisingly) in North America where about 3,500 calories of food are produced per day. That is less than double what a person needs per day, so “several times” seems unlikely.
But I don’t dispute the idea that we produce enough food to feed the world. But I also didn’t say we didn’t.
Could you comment on what I actually said, which is that an ageing population (or any situation in which there are more non-workers per worker) will result in less production being available for people on average?
This is not just about food; it is also about other necessities (such as healthcare) but also non-essentials like entertainment. The problem of an ageing population is not that we’ll starve to death; it’s that our quality of life will decrease.
That’s not what I said. That site measures the output of the chain. I said we grow more food (ie plants) than humanity can eat. We feed the majority of that food to the livestock we keep that absolutely dwarfs the biomass of all wild animals. That introduces a 90%+ caloric inefficiency. If we just ate the plants, we would have to stop growing so much food, even all our industrial processes don’t demand that much. But capitalism demands instead that we keep growing more food than the year before, and so it demands inefficiencies like animal ag. Any scarcity is entirely engineered. It’s not an accident, it’s by design. It is necessary to maximize investor return.
No, it’s because people like eating meat. You may have noticed that people ate meat centuries ago before capitalism existed, and favoured it over other foods when it was available.
But I understand what you meant about growing multiples of food, now, so that’s good.
This isn’t just about food, but look at the number of people one farmer could feed 200 years ago (6 or so) vs today (150 or so). We spend a lot of our productive time today doing stuff we didn’t have time for just a couple hundred years ago. We’ve got a long way to fall before we are unable as a species to meet our needs. Proponents of tech advances expect our productivity to increase even if the workforce shrinks. If our standard of living delines on average, either these prognosticators are incorrect or we have a huge allocation issue.
I think it is a problem if we need to have less free time, or work more for the same things that we do in our free time, because a higher proportion of worker time needs to be spent supporting people who are not working. You don’t want to go back 200 years even if humanity could survive in such conditions. (And the present population probably could not survive)
Except for population to grow it requires children which also don’t work, require more resources than elderly, and at the end of 20 years instead of freeing up resources (by dying like the elderly), continue to consume resources.
At the end of 20 years a child becomes an adult, who will (on average) be a net producer. It’s true that children cost more in work put into raising them than older adults take in work to look after them, yet it is a fact of life that one working human is capable of producing more stuff than just that which they themselves needs or makes use of - otherwise it would be impossible to raise children. This should be obvious, and means that the problem of an increasing birth rate, from this perspective, is at most temporary.
But I didn’t say we should have high birth rates, I said that the problems of low birth rates are not due to capitalism.
Land isn’t unlimited. Physical resources aren’t unlimited. For example while a person can manufacture more batteries, with more people on the planet each battery will be more expensive for everyone because each is vying for the same limited resources that are used to make a battery.
I also wouldn’t say that low birthrate is caused by capitalism but by over population. No economic system can sustain unlimited growth. When too many are competing for too few resources, there is no time for families.
You are not talking about what I was talking about, my friend.
The problem you describe as “temporary” implies that once your children are grown, they don’t have further children that will use more resources.
A worker in a growing population can somehow support 4 children and 2 parents (6 dependents) yet supporting only 2 parents and no children (2 dependents) is a problem?
So no, it’s not “temporary”. It’s a pyramid that eventually grows such that the foundation must crumble from the weight of everyone above.
Not really anything to do with capitalism. If
You think for-profit healthcare, including elder care, pharma care, and long-term care, aren’t a huge problem with capitalism written all over it, with every layer maximizing profits and minimizing services, then I I urge you to re-assess it.
I can’t really connect this comment with what you originally said. Maybe this will help clarify my position: I think countries with public health and social care, just like countries with mainly private health and social care, will have severe problems if they can’t arrest the rate at which their populations are ageing. My comment explains in very general terms why I think that is the case.
Who gives a shit. I’ll be dead.
The tricky part of being in society is that we want systems that work for more than just ourselves: It’s not a purely transactional relationship.
Great news! It doesn’t affect you either way, so we know your opinion on the matter is completely unbiased. That’s excellent.
People live longer. 100 years ago 50 year old man was old.
Yes people live a little longer. but the main average that skews average life expectancy/longevity numbers is today fewer babies and mothers die during and post birth.
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.
Not just fine, good.
After all this time humanity finally created a world with high life expectancy, just to start wondering now whether we should.
As long as that high lifespan comes with a high healthspan, it shouldn’t be a problem.
True, but that’s not the case yet. Old people generally need healthcare and other services (provided by young people).
And they don’t provide anything in return from their care homes. Honestly, it’s best to just send them off on an ice floe.
It would be better to keep them integrated in communities so they can serve as elders- providing advice, supporting children and parents, and spreading their community’s history.
The care homes are the problem, not the need for care.
True, that would be even better but sounds like communism so it won’t happen. I would certainly prefer it over the ice floe thing
After all this time humanity finally created a world with high life expectancy…
…and it only cost the sustainability of the lower class and the entire global south.
We fucked the climate up enough for it to cost the next generations the global north as well
That’s quite an achievement. We’re so awesome!
Of course we should. People dying is horrible. Anyone who thinks otherwise can opt in to check out.
If only that were legal in many places.
Of course I agree people dying is horrible, but there need to be enough people to take care of the elderly and to keep society running. Best hope for care robots I guess, although that seems dystopian too.
