Submitted 5 hours ago by WongKaKui@piefed.ca to [deleted]
Common theme with East Asia is the “population will shrink until society collapses”
Also I see this with the UK and Europe too, sometimes Canada. Always stuff like “something bad is gonna happen” with an image of stuff burning, as implying civil war because of reasons(?) 🤔
Seems kinda clickbaity
I see this on Youtube, Reddit, news, the internet in general.
Yes, it’s called demography. The point of calculating predictions is so we can react to them now. For example, in the 1960s, we predicted population growth would outpace our ability to produce enough food, and massive amounts of people would starve to death. In response, societies invested millions of dollars into agricultural development to be able to grow food more efficiently. By responding to the issue, we avoided having it. The claim wasn’t “wrong”, it did what it was supposed to do.
There are real problems in Japan and South Korea, but the headlines are clickbait. Everything is exaggerated for engagement. There’s truth there but you have to dismiss about 2/3rds of the sensationalism to get a good feel for how serious the problem actually is. The same goes for Europe and North America.
Big clickbait. The “concern” is that without an increasing population then we can’t pay for the benefits of the older population, therefore anything that slows growth means doom, collapse, whatever. We really do have to get our fiscal house in order, but overall cough cough there is enough wealth to take care of our society.
The population of Earth has doubled in my lifetime. Population growth is only slowing if you exclude brown people and focus on countries that 1)are wealthy and 2) don’t allow immigration. These ‘demographic bombs’ are the result of jingoism, immigration controls, and racism; they are entirely artificial.
Slow population growth is a crisis for capitalism not humanity. This is because capitalism requires infinite growth and the biggest engine that sustains that delusion is population growth. Just look who is freaking out about it.
Godzilla has been sighted on the move towards Tokyo Bay.
Gotta check then sources, and view things with a critical lens.
It’s always click bait, but sometimes* it’s based on real problems that could lead to those things. Let’s take three examples because I like to piss off sycophants everywhere:
Gordon Chang is a racist far-right white supremacist that uses this supposed Chinese ancestry to doomsay about China, and has done for literally decades. He has always been wrong. Every single prediction he has ever made. Every single one has been proven wrong. He has not ever had a single thing he has ever published come true.
Despite this, he is one of the US Media’s foremost experts on China, having been featured by every single major media outlet for the last nearly 30 years. Nearly every single story you have ever read on ‘China’s imminent economic collapse,’ or ‘The Chinese Stock market just collapsed,’ or ‘China’s economy is a paper dragon,’ or ‘China just ended their real estate market,’ or ‘China has five years left to kowtow to western demands before it collapses,’ is based on his work, as well as a select group of others that claim to be experts on China, have published work on China for decades, and have never once gotten a single prediction correct at any point in their careers.
Why is this narrative being pushed so hard and why does half of lemmy (and easily 70+% of western audiences) still fall for it day after day, year after year, despite the link I used being TWENTY-FIVE YEARS OLD?
Well one, racism, but two, if western media allows the concept that another way of life could work, and is working better than the current status quo, those that benefit from the current status quo might lose something. So hundreds of billions are spent every single year making sure that headlines from people like this keep coming. Constantly. And no one is allowed to question why or point out that their predictions have always failed to come true and are based on nothing more than the ‘feeling’ that communist rule leads to failure and suffering.
This is real. This is real data. Japan’s population has declined every single census for two decades now. The average age of Japanese citizens is only going up, and it is going up exponentially quickly, suggesting it is not just a lack of new births, but also a lack of resources to keep younger people alive longer. Thought honestly, I repeat myself.
Now why does it get so much news coverage, especially in the west?
2a. Japan is what a lot of racists want the west to be. As a far-right ethnostate dedicated to profit and social order above all other possible concerns, it is a blueprint for how a lot of western fascists want the west to be. Similar to Israel. So if it is failing, then that means that ideology might be a failure – liberals who do not want fascism like pointing this out, and point out the ‘solution’ is immigration and more open borders which solves the totally random and not at all concerning declining birth rate. Which ignores the roots of the problem.
2b. Racism. Japan is failing not because of its socioeconomic system or politics; but because the japanese cannot handle the superior white idealized socioeconomic system; and clearly white men need to come in and save the Japanese from themselves, both through ‘marriage’ and through taking over the government. Don’t worry, it’s not miscegenation if it’s white people doing it.
The UK is collapsing. Literally. Its economy cannot survive the next ten years on its current trajectory, as reasonably predicted by people who were against Brexit.
But it’s not because of immigrants. It’s just capitalism again. And it’s being blamed on immigrants because of racism.
Sudden large population changes can cause problems. Everyone seems to inherently understand the issue with rapid growth, but I often see people saying rapid decline is totally fine and sometimes even a good thing, actually.
Every job suddenly being understaffed would be a challenge. Every piece of infrastructure suddenly being oversized creates inefficiencies. National pensions take money from workers and give it to the elderly, which only works if workers far outnumber the elderly. Some countries are headed to a 1:1 ratio and China is estimated to soon have 5 dependents for every 1 worker. Pension plans will go bankrupt.
All of this will happen all at once, everywhere, in a few decades. I don’t think it’s going to create apocalyptic scenarios, but people were freaking out over gas prices being twice as expensive, imagine what they’re going to do when their pension payments stop.
Horsey@lemmy.world 1 hour ago
Any time you see a headlines about population collapse, remember that the hidden complaint is that wages will rise when there are less people in the job market.
So many business models are predicated on hiring low skilled, failed individuals to do menial labor for close to nothing in a job they can’t afford to quit.
When there are less people who are highly educated, slop jobs disappear which is a good thing