This is the true purpose of religion: to maintain the conveyor belt of cheap workers/soldiers through ‘marriage’, also the same reason religious folk universally agree on banning abortion.
The biggest problem is the aging population and the need to support them via social security, etc. As the population ages, the distribution becomes an inverted pyramid and we’ll need to pay for more and more people’s retirement. It’ll slowly become worse and worse as one person will eventually be responsible for the survival of 4-5 old people (and their family notwithstanding). Otherwise I think a declining population is fine.
Immigration doesn’t exist.
I’m not worried about population decline but regret to inform Anon that I was around when there were half as many people and it was not better. Sorry. There was terrible pollution and more crime.
We are humans and as such we have always adapted. We will adapt again. You can all live in fear re population decline if you like but I’m just getting on with it.
Unfortunately population decline isn’t always about low birth rates.
actually quite pragmatic 🤨
Who will pay to care for the aging population? Welp, whether you live in a socialised care country or the United hellscapes of America, the answer is: you will. Or your kids will, or whatever generation we’re talking about here.
Even if you do live in the US and have no elderly relatives, the insurance companies will have to hike the shit out of their premiums to remain profitable.
The fewer working age people there are compared to people past working age, the worse it will be.
I would imagine that the most cost-effective (realistic) way of solving it would be through some sort of culling.
Nothing flashy like forced euthanasia. But a reduction in available healthcare here, a drop in funding for elderly services there, some “dead weight” propaganda, and life expectancy would sink like a brick; all the while these policies would be presented as unavoidable cost-cutting measures to keep up appearances.
Yep. There’s a big bowl of shit, and some day it must be eaten. The choice becomes: do you eat the shit, or do you add a little squirt and pass it to your kids?
Billionnaires.
Population decline is fine. It’s the population boom driven by World War II panic that was the oddity instead.
In a matter of time, we might return to population levels from the 17th century, and if we do, then so what? A single individual will become all the more valuable, similar to how European nations valued labour more after the Black Death occurred. History likes to repeat itself, even if not necessarily by events like the plague.
What’s the connection between population decline and tight knit communities and crime? I can’t see any
Mostly just less anonymity. In a large community, you can remain more-or-less unknown. In a town where everyone knows each other, you’re a known entity whether you like it or not.
Big anonymous city is better environment for crime than village of 50 where everyone knows each other by name.
Except in practice living in the city no one ever steals from me and all the folks I know who live in rural areas are like “watch out for methheads, they’ll steal your shit”
“I guess we’ll have to increase wages”. Doesn’t work when there aren’t enough working people to maintain critical infrastructure.
World wide population decline is going to cause some serious problems. The US will need to establish a strong immigration policy to absorb people fleeing failing countries/geographies while continuing to provide food, and the transportation of that food, to the rest of the us.
The US will need to establish a strong immigration policy to absorb people fleeing failing countries/geographies
Why would anyone be running to the US? Do you think people dream of being forced into labor camps?
People still illegally immigrate to the USA right now despite everything that is going on. The reason is also still the same and I see no reason why that should change in the next decades. I mean other than a civil war, but that is not going to happen even if Trump grabs power so…
The US has a lot of space and a lot of farmland. Most countries don’t. As ocean transportation of food (amongst other resources) becomes less reliable due to lack of security, people will be fleeing their failed or failing country to one that’s more stable.
You’re right to think that the US has shit policies for immigration now but I think that will change once population decline starts affecting how much food is stocked at grocery stores.
I anticipate things being a lot worse than they are even now over the next 15 years. Multiple wars, state-sanctioned sea piracy, and a failure in the complex supply chain that creates advanced chipsets used for things like servers/workstations, satellites, weather prediction, stock markets, etc. leading to a mini-collapse as a best-case scenario.
Considering how people struggle with the comparatively small hiccup that is the current Iran-US war, I find it hard to believe that all commenters here would be fine when global trade dwindles.
I however am built different and would simply survive economic and societal collapse.
If society is constantly getting richer every single year and has for decades… Why are people still struggling? Either poor people are unreasonable/irrational, we don’t actually care about reducing cost of basic necessities,or the wealth increases are being siphoned out elsewhere.
Population decline would be a non-issue in a functioning economy, because a small shrinkage of the economy would be a non-issue.
I always hate it when someone says that we would need to reduce our standard of living to remain sustainable. It’s 100% bullshit predicted on using a definition of “standard of living” that nobody understands (roughly speaking I think it’s only used to compare two different persons or groups in an idealized snapshot in time). We waste so much food. Some of it’s necessary, but, 40%??
yes! If there wasn’t so much overconsumption by a small set of very rich folks everyone could live a comfortable life sustainably, it’s so frustrating
Society is going to collapse anyway, the question is, how hard and how badly. The whole idea behind “not sustainable” is that it is not possible to sustain something. I personally rather hit the brakes than accelerate before hitting the wall.
The whole idea behind “not sustainable” is that it is not possible to sustain something.
-1 That is not “the idea!”, that is the definition. A recursive one at that.
-2 That doesn’t really follow from either your or OPs comments. What is not sustainable? The economy, society, global trade? Did you delete a sentence?I think your comment makes more sense if I was arguing for people to counteract population decline. I am not. I was simply pointing out that it won’t be sunshine and rainbows as OP and many commenters here seem to believe.
Look what happened after the plague, 50% of the population was gone.
It broke the back of the Catholic church and feudalism. Peasants got their first pay raise… ever.
It broke the back of the Catholic church and feudalism. Peasants got their first pay raise… ever.
You’re missing maybe the most important part of this: …eventually. It was at least 40 years after the plague hit, and probably more like 70-100, depending how exactly you’re counting. AKA it might get better after we’re all dead
That seems…obvious?
Why would the effects of reduced population happen before the population is reduced?
I think feudalism carried on for 200 more years
I think there’s a comic series about that.
Even the fears about the economy and government spending are bullshit. Notice the folks obsessing over birthrates always quote the retiree to worker ratio. They don’t talk about the dependent to worker ratio, and that’s what really matters. Yes, our populations are aging, and yes that means relatively more old people to take care of. But we in turn also have far fewer children to take care of. If we can adapt to the Baby Boom era, we can adapt to an aging population.
Further afield, fears about human extinction are total bullshit. No country is a monolith; every nation has groups within it with higher and lower relative birth rates. If the birth rate stays low and never recovers among the mainstream society, eventually the smaller groups end up composing most of the population, and then the birth rate recovers. The Amish inherit the Earth.
Or, if even that fails, ultimately technology loss alone stabilizes your birthrates. Eventually your population falls so low that you just can’t physically manufacture reliable birth control anymore. That’s a product of industrial production. It requires a certain minimum population size to run a factory. Below that and we just regress to earlier technological eras. Eventually we end up back in a mostly agrarian state, and suddenly having kids is once again economically beneficial.
Well, the Japan’s population is declining and they’ve been in stagflation for the last 30 years.
Japan is a whole other mess caused by the exotic monetary policy used to cushion the real estate crash and a risk adverse corporate culture unwilling to properly make use of it, causing investment to stagnate.
Houses are already kept artificially empty to retain prices. Capitalism always finds a way to screw you over.
The people that want higher birth rates don’t care about higher wages, the environment, or people’s safety.
They just need workers they can milk them until they can’t work anymore. They need these workers to spend all their money so they have to keep working.
The endgame of capitalism is slavery.
The early game of capitalism was slavery
Midgame pretty much unions, now mostly a speed bump in the rearview mirror.
Perhaps that should change.
They also want to make sure people with a different skill color do not have more babies than them.
I think that’s actually the main reason.
And it never ever ever goes as planned because the bigots running the eugenics program are myopic twits.
Is skill coloured by the type of skill or by the level of skill?
By rarity.
who will work unskilled jobs if there aren’t enough people to do them?
Immigrants usually
Also the financial ponzi schemes break all at once pissing off old people who vote in mecha-hitler to enslave everyone under 40 so their house prices and pensions stay high.
I mean, this is a pretty silly response. Is there a hidden population of Martians I’m not aware of, eager to immigrate to Earth to work our low skill jobs?
Huh? Global population is still growing. (More slowly now, but the slope is still strongly positive.) We haven’t hit peak human population yet and won’t any time soon. That means if the population of the US declines, we can just import more USians.
We’re talking about a global phenomenon here. It’s pretty racist to assume that other groups of human beings are somehow fundamentally different from your own. It’s pretty xenophobic to believe that the countries with high birth rates will just maintain them forever.
The problem isn’t the US running out of workers. The problem is the entire world running out of workers.
They are fundamentally different; the west is looting their country for resources and cheap labor, they will maintain high birthrates so long as neocolonialism prevents them from developing their own means of production.
Put down the socialist theory and look up actual demographic numbers. You’re just wrong.
Are you suggesting that birthrates don’t remain high in the global south?
You’re trying to move the goalposts. We’re talking about the future and how birth rates are trending. Now you’re trying to change the conversation to the present, “Are you suggesting that birthrates don’t remain high in the global south?” Obviously they’re higher in some countries, but those rates are collapsing like they are everywhere else. And there isn’t a good match between those countries and what is usually described as the global south.
Since you’re too lazy, I did your homework for you: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1034075/fertility-rate-world-continents-1950-2020/
You can look up more information here: https://www.birthrate.io/fertility
We’re talking about the future need for workers, not the present. So please don’t try to move the goalposts by asking the obvious question of are birth rates still higher in the SOME PARTS of the global south relative to the north.
But there’s a very clear trend here. Every single country undergoes a decline in birth rates as it industrializes. The global south is not an infinite source of labor you can rely on forever.
You need to let go of this myopic North/South, Imperialist/Colonized framework you seem to be trying to shoehorn into every problem. Here are the countries that have above replacement fertility rates (in green):
There’s no real connection here between these countries and “the global south.” Counties such as India, most of South America, Iran, SE Asia, etc are all below replacement rates.
Here’s what fertility rates are currently projected to look like in 2100:
We’re on track to have less than a handful of countries around the world with above-replacement fertility rates. The global south doesn’t have elevated fertility rates, the specific regions of Subsaharan Africa and Central Asia do. Even Somalia will barely be above the replacement rate.
You’re too lost in a surface-level understanding of “theory” (read: socialist memes) that it’s clouding your judgment. Within a generation, countries all over the world, including countries in the global south, will be fighting each other to attract immigrants.
