Considering humanity is a runaway virus on earth, this is a good thing.
in a way, this is my username:
Epicurus rejected any possibility of an afterlife, while still contending that one need not fear death: “Death is nothing to us; for that which is dissolved, is without sensation, and that which lacks sensation is nothing to us.”[72] From this doctrine arose the Epicurean Epitaph: Non fui, fui, non sum, non curo (“I was not; I was; I am not; I do not care.”), which is inscribed on the gravestones of his followers and seen on many ancient gravestones of the Roman Empire.[73]
While I understand the reason why a demographic dropout would be a catastrophe, I fucking hate how they say it’s our fault, when they were the ones who fucked up everything in the first place
I’ll spot you “they” as the endless white nationalist nags and natalist pundits. For some reason “population collapse” never shows up as a concern for Palestinians or Cubans or Bangledeshis or Congolese. It’s only ever a rich white European problem.
But this endless “I didn’t start the fire” rhetoric kinda ignores how the prior generation as a whole had about as much control over their material conditions as we do now. Just being mad at The Olds neglects how many of them delivered the education and health care and technology and agriculture that brought us to the modern moment [in a good way].
Not to be all “you hate capitalism and yet cell phone” but you gotta see the prior generation as the same group of disaffected working class as we have in the modern day.
Ffs, our parents were inundated with “Overpopulation” as the crisis du jour. They were lectured over having too many kids and having kids when they were too young and not being economically independent enough to care for anyone but themselves. We inherited that from them and internalized it. And now we meticulously practice contraception because we’ve been drilled to believe it’s the responsible thing to do.
Only post-COVID have we really seen the Natalist Panic taking off. It’s a complete 180⁰ and largely the product of Millennial insecurities.
In 20 years its stabilized tho, just gotta get over the baby boomers bump right? that are creating gray pressure on health and housing rn, soon a lot of people will inherit their gold, rich stay rich, tax inheritance. Japan is a glimpse in our future, they have to work 60 hours, and focus on automation and rely heavily on immigration even tho they don’t want to.
current population of Europe
Prediction in 50 years:
The area under the curve above 65 vs the area under the curve below 65 is the issue when combined with all of our institutions and social contracts being designed for endless growth
50% of all new homeless people in the US are above 55 years old which should tell you how this is going to go. It’s not going to be like Japan for most western nations. Japan is the best case scenario.
I would blame declining birth rates to liberalism and capitalism.
I’d blame contraception. And by blame I mean celebrate.
But the idea that teenagers aren’t fucking because Capitalism really undersells the impact of hormones. Kids fucked under feudalism. They fucked under theocracy. They fucked as serfs and slaves. They fucked as cave people. The mode of production isn’t what’s at issue.
Birth rates in North Korea are still below replacement level, same as South Korea. Some of the highest birthrates in the world are happening in active war zones. Some of the lowest in the safest and wealthiest.
It’s not that they’re afraid of society collapsing. They clearly don’t care about that, as most of what they do ignores that.
What they’re worried about is the “Great Replacement”, where white people become a minority. If that wasn’t what they were really afraid of, then they would consider the problem of declining birth rates to be easily solvable with immigration.
Also can’t oppress some wage slaves to to generate wealth for them if they are never born, it’s all about money at the end, white supremacy is a secondary concern
I mean, declining birth rates still cause problems. Even if you’re sane and don’t give a shit about shifting racial demographics.
Shits gonna be really rough for my generation when we’re too old to take care of ourselves, while also outnumbering the young people.
I hear this all the time, and it seems to ignore the glaring elephant in the room. When talking about whether you can keep an economic system going, what matters is not the ratio of workers to retirees, but the ratio of workers to dependents. Yes, we have more old people for each worker, but we also have fewer children. We can simply shift resources from child care to elder care. You manufacture more adult diapers and fewer infant diapers. More nurses go into gerentology than neonatal care. You shift government funding from elementary schools to pensions. More women can stay in the workforce, because fewer of us are having children. And those that do are having fewer of them.
We know that economies can adapt to rapidly growing populations. We’ve survived baby booms just fine. After WW2, in the US, we suddenly had to care for far more children than our system was ever built to handle. Yet we managed to muddle through it. If we can adapt to a baby boom, we can adapt to a slowly aging population. Capitalism, for all its flaws, does have some benefits. And one of those is that it’s pretty efficient at reallocating resources based on changing demand.
And honestly, there are some real upsides to declining population. We can ease our impact on the environment. The real cost of housing will decline. Scarcer workers will see their wages rise. This is the real reason the billionaires are so afraid of a declining population. They need millions of desperate people struggling just to scrape by. Do you think Amazon could run its hellish warehouses the way it does if the cost of housing was half what it currently is?
That all assumes people will not be living longer in the future.
The real cost of housing will decline.
Children generally live with their parents. We’d have to all start living with our elderly parents for it to be the same in terms of housing costs.
This is the real reason the billionaires are so afraid of a declining population. They need millions of desperate people struggling just to scrape by. Do you think Amazon could run its hellish warehouses the way it does if the cost of housing was half what it currently is?
You shouldn’t assume billionaires are that intelligent. A huge amount of money has been invested into AI on the promise that it will take away people’s jobs. billionaires are emotionally driven idiots. They learned from Jack Welch that if you cut jobs, line goes up. Therefore if you cut half of all the jobs, line goes up big. They’re small minded people that don’t think in terms of how the economy functions, they only care about their businesses.
If it were the case billionaires had some over arching plan for the economy, then Jeff Bezos would be thinking that if everyone were more prosperous, people would be buying more stuff from Amazon, wouldn’t he?
They just want a bigger percentage of the pie, they don’t care if the entire pie is smaller and in absolute terms a smaller percent of a bigger pie is more than a larger percent of a smaller pie. Why would they? They already have more money than they could ever spend, so they’re obsessed with having more power than their competitors. Racking up a high score and gaining more power.
But your (our?) generation won’t outnumber young people if young people keep immigrating. Not that “keep foisting the burden of perpetual growth on the young” is ACTUALLY a good plan, but it’s exactly the kind of selfish arch-capitalist thinking that they’d be all in favor of if it was white young people.
There’s been a rash of people like Elon Musk posting rants about “declining birth rates in the developing world” (and sometimes dog whistling while at it) - getting upset that contrary to the worries of Malthus and Ehrlich, it turns out humans are not the same as bacteria in a petri dish just exponentially reproducing until they exhaust all the carrying capacity of their environment. Instead, it seems that those of us that are in paradigms where we have relatively high per capita energy and materials consumption, respond to economic, cultural and environmental stimuli, and slow our roll once we feel we are at an “x” threshold of population density and environmental & economic stress.
Given that we live on a finite planet with finite resources this small bit of self control might just be what saves humanity from a truly dystopian future.
What the demographic shift of less younger workers versus more retiring seniors does mean is that our systems of depending on constant growth of consumption for our faith in our currency and financial institutions, and for providing for government guaranteed retirement funding, both end up under threat - but those issues could still be easily fixed simply by allowing more immigration from the multitude of places on this globe that still have relatively high birth rates, that have plenty of people with strong work ethics seeking greater opportunities.
Given that we live on a finite planet with finite resources this small bit of self control might just be what saves humanity from a truly dystopian future.
I don’t think it’s a planetary limit we’re hitting. Population expansion is highest in parts of the world with some of the worst living conditions.
A lot boils down to access to contraception. Take that away and all those horny teenagers will fuck out more babies, because hormones override any kind of logical long term economic understanding.
declining birth rates in the developing world
Looks like it ain’t developing anymore lol
I really like how you connected the birth rates and excessive consumerism as a self-fulfilling prophecy. As capitalism reaches its apex, motivations for increasing birth rate collapse. As birth rates collapse, excessive consumerism stagnates, because people can’t afford to retire.
allowing more immigration from the multitude of places on this globe
But then the immigrants will take all the jobs and also not work and take all the money from citizens.
Do you even FOX bro?
Immigration is really irrelevant to this discussion. Every country is rapidly aging, including the poorer countries that currently have above-replacement birth rates. We’re all going down the same path. Some nations are just further along the path than others. Unless there’s a large population of Martians eager to immigrate that I’m not aware of, immigration is not a long term solution to this.
Total population across the planet is most certainly still climbing each and every year - significantly. And prior history (e.g. USA during the Ellis lsland era circa 1890-1924) shows allowing & enabling immigration most certainly can be a way of markedly improving economic outlooks for not just the immigrants but also the prior residents - for at least the next few decades, if not a good bit beyond that, perhaps even into the next century.
And as for beyond that - again, my take is we should be celebrating that it looks like humanity, is not going blindly pop out babies beyond the carrying capacity of our planet.
Of course we likely could be facing massive challenges due to climate change and idiotic policies being dictated by short sighted oligarchies. But at least it looks like the kind of overpopulation overshoot that was feared by lots of 20th century analysts might get avoided due to some arguably rational reactions by younger generations to the world they now find themselves in.
Spoiler alert: they’ll just ban contraception, abortion and sex ed instead
Jokes on them, I’m not having any sex.
Meh, can’t have a baby in the mouth or the butt.
Yup. I’m just one private citizen. The replacement ratio of my country’s population is not my responsibility. 🤷♂️
Republicans will simply declare that child birth is the patriotic duty of every American woman of healthy reproductive capacity. Men will be drafted to war. Women will be drafted into childbirth via forced artificial insemination. Legally speaking, if a man can be drafted to give up his life and sacrifice his body “for the greater good of the nation,” there’s little reason that a woman couldn’t be drafted for forced birth. If your government can force you to die for your country, your government can force you to give birth for your country.
You think it’s gonna be forced artificial insemination in that scenario? It’s absolutely going to go back to the times where women have to marry bc they’re not allowed to own anything (land, bank account, their own bodies) and marital rape won’t be considered real bc husband’s own their wives. Of course, this is if the fascists get their way. Given how the left has been rising up and voting in actual leftists/socialists in the primaries these last few months, the fascists are going to have actual opposition rather than just controlled opposition corpo dems
oh no declining birth rates, how horrible for the ones who decided not to have kids, and hence don’t have anyone to worry about
Declining birth rates and house prices dropping are both things the media love to make out are terrible things.
And they just aren’t.
I suppose house prices dropping are pretty terrible if you see your house only as an investment, instead of a roof over your head. I know people who would be fucked in their retirement if they house price falls, because they’ve gambled on their house price climbing enough to carry them through retirement.
I hope they get hurt though. Treating housing as an investment that needs to turn a profit, while people are living on the streets is fucking insane.
Just saving gold has been a realistic option for all of living memory. Nobody needs gold. One is not depriving others of the resources they need to live by raising its price.
The same can’t be said for housing.
Declining birth rates and house prices dropping are both things the media love to make out are terrible things.
and guess who own’s the media’s editorial circle?
Don’t care, I’m not producing wage slaves.
yeah basically. im actually fine with my genetic line going out if the earth goes on with a vibrant biosphere as well.
It’s interesting because it’s obvious that the reason why people are having less children is because they can’t afford it and they don’t think it’s a good idea for the children.
However, rather than actually remedying this situation, the people who want us to have as many children as humanly possible so they have more workers are doing everything in their power to make life worse.
Oh you’re finally finding out? Oh noooooo all that fucking around for nothing. Oops.
They have to decline or stabalise at fucking point, since we cant have 10 trillion people or something on the planet. Truthfully we just need the brains to figure out how to run our economy without an unending supply of increasing labour.
Some people cannot fathom the concept of limited resources. They think you can increase human population exponentially forever and it’ll just work out somehow
We could easily support our current population and quite a bit more if we actually respected and shared our resources responsibly.
We could easily support our current population and quite a bit more if we actually respected and shared our resources responsibly.
I think this is a monumentally bad argument. Statistically, you are typing this from a computer or smartphone, with internet access, and are probably part of the segment of humanity that consumes the most resources (as am I). You are saying that if we want to have 15, 20, 30 billion people, we can all just live like the most impoverished people in the world and it will be fine.
It’s a quality vs. quantity problem. Maximizing human numbers means we must have very low per-person consumption to minimize impact. Maximizing quality of life means we can all eat/travel/live/consume how we want and the environmental impact will still be low (but with fewer people). I think that’s far more desirable.
EDIT: to distill down the argument further - you support voluntarily decreasing your standard of living, so that we can grow the population more, for the benefit of… ? Creating lives that have not yet been born and can’t care?
Whatever you want, I personally do not want a decrease in my standard of living, and especially not to feed the capitalist machine that requires growth at all costs. I presume, if faced with a real and present choice of the same kind, most people would choose to uphold their standard of living instead of sacrificing, only so that more billions of people can be born. When is it enough? Do we really NEED 8B+ people? I wouldn’t mind living in a world of <1B people where everyone has luxury and plenty without destroying the planet in the process. We can’t get there, but the principle still holds. Put resources into solving the problem of elder care, and just let the population decline naturally.
Hell, we could increase exponentially forever if we wanted. The universe is practically infinite
God that thought is horrifying.
Look at what we’re doing to this planet. The best things humans can do for every other form of life out there is die out.
No. The physics does not allow this. Physics does allow interstellar travel and colonization. However, the resources required are immense. To transport a single human being between star systems would require more energy than it would take to keep them alive in decadent luxury for centuries. We’re talking hard limits of physics here. Sure, you can imagine this will be solved by some magical technology outside the known laws of physics, like a perpetual motion machine, but you could then just as easily imagine using that magical technology to keep people alive back at home.
Interstellar colonization would be a wonderful idea, but simply as a means of backing up life. And spreading life through the universe has value in and of itself. It’s a wonderful thing to yearn for.
But interstellar travel has absolutely zero utility as a means of addressing population growth.
Oh, and you can only have so many humans living in any given volume of space before the raw output of their body heat cooks them all alive. Regardless of your tech, there are only so many humans you can cram into a volume the size of the solar system.
uhh, yeah, travel takes a whole lot of resources, but you’d only need to transport very few elements around, like a seed of a tree. and when you land on a new planet, you have more resources to utilize and go on. so your image is too limited here.
Please read the thread carefully. You’re fundamentally misunderstanding the context of this discussion. We aren’t talking about interstellar travel in general. We’re talking specifically about the utility of using interstellar travel as a means of keeping exponential growth going forever.
The species can keep growing by extending out to the stars, but an individual star system can’t. Eventually your star system reaches a maximum population. In the age of European imperialism, Europe shipped its excess population off to settler colonies Australia and the Americas. That will never be possible between star systems. In the 1800s, Britain could lower its resource demand by sending people off to the Americas. It took far more resources to keep a person alive for their lifetime than it did to send someone across the ocean. But you save no net resources by shipping someone off to Alpha Centauri. Sol will not be able to solve an overpopulation problem by shipping people off to distant Suns. And it’s not a matter of how much cargo you bring with. The energy required to move just your body across interstellar distances dwarfs what is required to keep you alive for many lifetimes.
So, no, population cannot grow forever. Eventually Sol will have to stabilize its birth rates, or it will have a problem. Starting new seed colonies around distant stars can probably be done. But it won’t allow the population or economy of a single star system to keep growing forever. With interstellar colonization, you’re not expanding your civilization to multiple star systems, you’re budding off new independent civilizations around those distant Suns.
A seed is actually a perfect metaphor for interstellar colonization. A tree can throw a seed to the wind to make new trees far away, but those seeds don’t help that original tree grow any bigger.
yeah and since alls we need is the vaccum of space to thrive its definately doable.
Yep, but it would take careful planning. Like, actually listen to the smart people who know how to design a long-term sustainable system, rather than just chasing profit at all costs.
It’s not even that hard to do, just let people do the right thing. Every researcher that says “we could fix this”, we automatically assume that voice will be ignored at best or crushed at worst, but it doesn’t have to be this way.
Exxon mobil knew climate change would have devasting effects decades ago. But it wasnt profitable within their lifetimes to admit that or do anything about it
