8+ billion people on the planet and people complain about not enough people.
Anon isn't worried about population decline
Submitted 3 weeks ago by Early_To_Risa@sh.itjust.works to greentext@sh.itjust.works
https://sh.itjust.works/pictrs/image/aa975e2d-e584-42f6-beac-33cc14b0c349.jpeg
Comments
GonzoAtBarstow@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
whalesnrainbows@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Yeah, people worried about “population decline” are actually concerned about their preferred race/religion losing political & cultural power.
It’s a dog whistle every time
thebestaquaman@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
It’s a dog whistle every time.
Population decline isn’t inherently a problem (unless you’re a racist worried about “your people” losing power). Too rapid population decline is a big problem. We’re already seeing the effects: When the sum of birth rates and working-age immigration fall fast enough, the ratio of working-age people to care-needing people also falls. I don’t think I need to explain why it’s a problem that every able-bodied working age adult will be responsible (directly or indirectly) for taking care of more people. It puts more pressure on everyone, and impacts societies ability to care for those in need of it.
A controlled, slow, population decline would probably just be a good thing at this point. However, that’s not what prognoses are pointing towards, and that’s why (non-racist) people are worried.
deadbeef79000@lemmy.nz 2 weeks ago
Hegemony is the word you’re looking for.
Yeah, always a dog whistle.
HerbGrower@slrpnk.net 2 weeks ago
Why would I care about how many people are the same race as me? It could only be a problem if you keep racism.
Fallibilist@feddit.uk 2 weeks ago
Worry about population decline isn’t about wanting more people. It’s about wanting there to be enough working-age people to cover the retirement and medical payments of the ones no longer working. We know exactly how many 30-year-olds we’ll have in 20 years and it’s simply not enough. Something has to give and usually the first to go is the benefits for the people who most need them.
666dollarfootlong@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Or maybe the something that has to give is a minority class of people (the .1%) getting a few percent higher tax “burden”
GonzoAtBarstow@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
That falls back to “ponzi schemes aren’t sustainable”
UltraGiGaGigantic@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
usually the first to go is the benefits for the people who most need them.
Then this way of life is not worth saving.
LodeMike@lemmy.today 1 week ago
Enough for what? There are plenty of unemployed people.
isleepinahammock@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
Why the obsession with only retirees? What matters is the dependency ratio.Image
The dependency ratio counts the total number of dependents, not just the retirees the eugenicists like to focus on. By the end of the century, globally we’ll have a dependency ratio similar to the level it was in the mid-20th century.
MalReynolds@slrpnk.net 2 weeks ago
When do they teach ‘carrying capacity’ and what happens after it’s exceeded these days?
superduperpirate@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Ya know, I have vague memories of reading an argument somewhere that the black plague killed off so many peasants that the surviving ones had materially less shitty conditions for a little while, due to scarcity and all that.
Varesti@lemmy.zip 3 weeks ago
Great news, we’re bringing the plague back too!
ladicius@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
The actual disease caused by pest bacteria is easily treatable nowadays.
GolfFoxtrotLima@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Don’t newer more dangerous plagues and viruses and diseases
sharkfucker420@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
Specifically, the peasants had more bargaining power for better conditions because the absolute decrease in their number made each of them more valuable to the ruling class as individuals. There was an increase in peasant revolts, and concessions to the peasantry following the black death partly for this reason.
logos@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Peasants only got the ability to leave the land they were bound to to seek better employment elsewhere after the black plague.
Triasha@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
This is true in places. There are also acounts of places where all the nobility died and the peasants threw weeks long parties.
someguy3@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Yup, labor scarcity meant higher wages and bargaining power.
Mulligrubs@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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.
Ledivin@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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, depending how exactly you’re counting. AKA after we’re all dead
impairedimperator@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
That seems…obvious?
Why would the effects of reduced population happen before the population is reduced?
nullspace@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
I think there’s a comic series about that.
majster@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
I think feudalism carried on for 200 more years
OctopusNemeses@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
When the population was predicted to explode into the 21st century, the news said this was a big problem. Now the population is expected to gradually decline. The news is saying this is a big problem.
Sly2@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
What News is saying this?
lessthanluigi@lemmy.sdf.org 2 weeks ago
The Onion of course, onionguy!
qarbone@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Not all news, per se, but I do recall seeing reporting on how a good handful of countries are trying to combat falling birth rates. Like in Far East and Far North countries.
SkaveRat@discuss.tchncs.de 2 weeks ago
They are problems for different reasons
FavouriteShapes@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Both can be a problem
rumba@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
Booms have market opportunity, and busts have market opportunity.
That said, having too many people to do the work is a lot less dangerous than not enough people to do the work.
The bust comes with a high risk of a total economic collapse. Those houses get cheap, but food, sanitary, and energy security are at risk. Living in a rotting infrastructure is very different than living in an expanding but underdeveloped infrastructure.
Leveling out or a slow population decline would be good in some scenarios. If we’re going from 2.5:1 down to 0.25:1, you’ll end up with another boomer wave, pissed off at the government, ripe for scenarios that make today’s problems seem like an annoying party.
Randelung@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Houses are already kept artificially empty to retain prices. Capitalism always finds a way to screw you over.
Serinus@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
We just never get to retire. workers per retiree over time
By 2030 it’s projected to be 2.0 workers per retiree.
Serinus@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
Seems like it’d be a good place for the last 50 years of gains in efficiency to go.
Time to start taxing the rich instead of worrying about taxing per worker.
HerbGrower@slrpnk.net 2 weeks ago
Build more housing so that houses are more affordable, bring on the 4 day work week.
Expensive houses just funnels more money into the hands of banks and landlords without providing any benefit to society.
limdaepl@feddit.org 2 weeks ago
What does „retiree per worker“ graphs always fail to mention is how productivity increased over the same period.
Those two workers today produce about as much as 8 did in the 50s so supporting the retirees should in fact be easier today, not harder.
That it isn’t is because wages didn’t increase proportionately.
boonhet@sopuli.xyz 2 weeks ago
That it isn’t is because wages didn’t increase proportionately
Yes, because your wages go to said retirees. Who do you think owns all the companies not increasing your wages?
UltraGiGaGigantic@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
Sounds like everyone shouldn’t have kids then so they dont have to go through the burden of caring for douchebags.
boonhet@sopuli.xyz 2 weeks ago
Good idea, but then let’s get rid of the concept of retirement too.
jaybone@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
Why did it increase in the 90s and stabilize for a decade?
WizardofFrobozz@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
People forget how much was going right in the 90s. Boomers were in their prime working years, paying into Social Security instead of collecting it. Women’s participation in the workforce had hugely expanded. Also a decade of strong economic growth and job creation meant more people working, lower unemployment, and more money going into the system. It allowed the US to briefly reverse the decades-long decline in the number of workers supporting each Social Security beneficiary, and then kept that ratio stable for a while. Obviously some of that was demographic luck, but the Clinton economy was actually putting people to work.
khaleer@sopuli.xyz 2 weeks ago
you all going to say bullshit about retirement, like fascist around the globe don’t want to take it from you already, no amount of canon fodders you spawn for billionaires won’t change that
prole@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
increase wages
Hahahaha oh. That’s cute.
Funkt4st1c@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
If theres a shortage in the labor market, you either fill it with slavery or raise wages.
Americans track record seems to indicate the former waaayyyy before the latter
boonhet@sopuli.xyz 2 weeks ago
Raising wages fucks the people trying to retire because their stock holdings lose value. It’ll have to be slavery you want to continue having retirement as a thing. Ideally colonialism + slavery, just import slaves from countries still experiencing population growth, such as many African ones…
Couldbealeotard@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
If you can’t afford to tip, you can’t afford to eat out. Maybe you should get a second job that pays $2ph
boonhet@sopuli.xyz 2 weeks ago
Okay, but retirement is based off there being more people working than not, so in countries with national pensions we’ll have to significantly raise taxes, and in countries without such a system, retirees who are invested into index funds, need publicly traded corporations to start underpaying their employees even more (it’s really eye-opening when you realize people over 55 own 73% of all the resources of the US, from money to stocks to real estate).
FavouriteShapes@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
Sounds to me like we’ll have to do a communism, i.e banding together to help each other out more, to allow people to retire in comfort. The horror!
LodeMike@lemmy.today 2 weeks ago
Oh no not rich people having less money.
isleepinahammock@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
Hogwash. You forgot the other half of the equation. We don’t have as many children to support. Notice how people obsessed over birth rate always focus on the retiree:worker ratio rather than the dependent:worker ratio? The problem disappears once you realize we can simply take money that we were spending on childcare and shift it to eldercare.
majster@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
Children live with parents. If retirement becomes burden of your offspring this will have interesting consequences.
Re resource shift: in my country we managed to increase total employment in education while birthrates continue to dwindle
jumping_redditor@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
isn’t that specifically the government pentions! social security and somewhat less important to those that have personal retirement accounts?
sit@lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 week ago
I love this community for some posts where people have serious discussions or stating their mind and other posts with shittalk mayhem
Ashrakal@lemmy.ml 2 weeks ago
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.
chunes@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
The population isn’t declining, though. See for yourself: www.worldometers.info/world-population/
inconel@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
The slowing down of population growth is real though. Trend of fewer children is across the board not just developed countries. Current trajectory estimates population to peak out in 2050-2080 and then decline, for some in their youth in next 30 or 50 years may not be that too far to completely dismiss.
jaybone@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
2050-2080
Depending on how climate change goes, population might decline by many billions. Hopefully I’ll be dead by then.
Denjin@feddit.uk 2 weeks ago
Scroll down that page a bit and you’ll find the “Rate of Growth” chart where you can see a clear decline in birth rate increase globally since the 1960s and it’ll only be another decade or so with current trends before we are in genuine negative population growth. And that’s also assuming there are no more pandemics and/or global scale ecologocial catastrophes likely to happen in that time (there almost certainly will be).
Eq0@literature.cafe 2 weeks ago
That’s not what the given website says. The given source predicts a continuous growth until at least 2100, while the growth rate slowly grinds to a halt but doesn’t go negative. Obviously this is only one possible forecast, others give different outcomes
whyNotSquirrel@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
I think it’s because we are living longer and the effects of lower birthrate will be shown later
isleepinahammock@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
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.
NotAnOtter@lemmus.org 2 weeks ago
Lower population is generally better for almost all sectors.
But lowering the population means killing people or restricting birthing rights.
Earthwormjim91@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Well no. That’s a wildly incorrect take.
Birth rates are already decreasing and are below replacement rate in many places already. Fertility rates are at an all time low. They naturally decrease as income and quality of life increases.
The global fertility rate is 2.2 births per woman. Which is just barely above replacement. In most developed nations, that rate is down in the 1.6 range, well below replacement.
Total Human population is excepted to peak within 50 years and then begun naturally declining, but many countries are already there. China has seen several consecutive years of population decline. India is seeing a leveling off of population growth and will soon decline. The US is increasing solely off of immigration. Japan has a decreasing population. Same with Korea. 8 EU countries have seen population declines over the last 20 years.
If you wanted to see population decline in the US specifically, banning immigration would do it and we’d see a decline in the next census.
lightnsfw@reddthat.com 2 weeks ago
People can also just stop breeding. Seems to be happening in a lot of developed countries. Might be slower but I bet the population will level off eventually. Or plummet dramatically from climate change/right wing political policies.
Tattorack@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Well, I dunno about you, but I’m in no hurry to get children.
EmilieEasie@fedinsfw.app 2 weeks ago
Yeah, there will probably be some growing (er, shrinking) pains, but I’m totally fine if the world just wasn’t meant to have 10 billion people on it
Chick0nPlayz@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
who will work unskilled jobs if there aren’t enough people to do them?
Immigrants usually
Tudsamfa@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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.
Triasha@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
There are real challenges to population decline, especially rapid decline like Korea, Taiwan, Ukraine, russia, and China are facing.
The US and Great Britain are not looking at that rapid decline. For us, it’s a problem to be managed. Every generation of schoolchildren is 75% the size of the preceeding generation.
That’s manageable. No promises that we will do anything to manage it, but it’s not crisis level. Other countries will have greater problems. JApan has been doing Allright.
Rusty@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
Well, the Japan’s population is declining and they’ve been in stagflation for the last 30 years.
meaansel@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
Who’s gonna build that real estate with fewer people around? Where would money for higher salary come from with fewer customers? Pollution argument is a “carbon footprint” type of bullshit to shift responsibility to general population from companies that actually do most of pollution, and violently defend their right to do so. Communities become less highly knit because of third spaces dying, phones colonising spare time, and algorithms pushing people to have worse view of world and each other.
Increase population should increase efficiency (economies of scale, many products of intellectual labor being infinitely replicatable) - and efficiency did increase at the same time as population. It’s just that salaries didn’t.
Mental gymnastic to make worsening conditions of ordinary people somehow fault of other ordinary people.
mHtt@lemmy.ca 2 weeks ago
This is the true purpose of religion: to maintain the conveyor belt of cheap workers through ‘marriage’
rizzothesmall@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
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.
PragmaticOne@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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.
LH0ezVT@sh.itjust.works 2 weeks ago
The right wing family values rural living types seem awfully strange when they are unhappy about the suggestion that we return to 1960s population levels
cadekat@pawb.social 3 weeks ago
The per capita cost of maintaining existing infrastructure costs does become a problem, but yeah, a solvable one.
csolisr@hub.azkware.net 3 weeks ago
One caveat: the rich would rather use violence to force the few people left into menial tasks, than increase wages even a cent.RBWells@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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.
Brkdncr@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
“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.
Juice@midwest.social 2 weeks ago
Eugenics apologia.
frog@feddit.uk 3 weeks ago
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.
ladicius@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
The endgame of capitalism is slavery.
JeSuisUnHombre@lemmy.zip 2 weeks ago
The early game of capitalism was slavery
x00z@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
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.
svcg@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 weeks ago
Is skill coloured by the type of skill or by the level of skill?
BillionaireStew@lemmy.world 2 weeks ago
And it never ever ever goes as planned because the bigots running the eugenics program are myopic twits.
yris.yira.org/…/be-fruitful-and-multiply-the-role…