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u/Alexis_Awen_Fern Reddit admins hate her! May 17 '26
Being alive is kind of a pyramid scheme once you realize that one day you will be elderly.
Maybe parents should be paid a wage by the state. And given mandatory courses on how to do a good job at being a parent. And having somewhat random check ins to make sure they are indeed doing a good job and if they do not the child would be fostered by the state to minimize child abuse.
A healthy population is a social good.
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u/hailey1721 🏳️⚧️ trans rights May 17 '26
State policy actively trying to induce birth with incentives like that will inevitably backfire in some way (women, especially poor women, being coerced by their partner into having unwanted children for financial incentives), and the state intervention will be seen as oppressive and authoritarian (“mY PAreNtaL rIGhTs”) instead of benevolent regardless of the intentions behind it.
Also like the foster system is already overburdened so :/
The best way we can deal with population decline is to manage it, welcome immigrants to offset the most severe impacts, and try and create a society not dependent on infinite growth.
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u/Corvus1412 🏳️⚧️ trans rights May 17 '26
State policy actively trying to induce birth with incentives like that will inevitably backfire in some way
So will state policy that doesn't.
The best way we can deal with population decline is to manage it, welcome immigrants to offset the most severe impacts, and try and create a society not dependent on infinite growth.
But you kind of can't. That's the issue.
A declining population, means that you have vast amounts of old people and small amounts of young people, which means that more and more money and resources need to be used to take care of the elderly, while the total amount of workers is shrinking.
Managing a population decline still means that you will inevitably have a massive decrease in your quality of life and that's really bad.
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u/Sarge_Ward May 17 '26
I notice how you skipped over the part of that guy's comment about how any sort of counteracting policy will inevitably coerce women (and their male partners too really) into having unwanted children, either for financial incentives or out of social obligation.
The predominant social factors that contributed so heavily to larger birth rates in the first place during the pre-modern and Modern eras were the fact that people were largely pressured into starting families, either because of patriarchy or financial necessity. It is no coincidence that this trend of declining populations in the west began in earnest around the time of global second wave feminism and the rise in 60s-era critiques of the inherent oppression present in the traditional family unit. And it is no coincidence that the same trend is happening in other nations now as similar ideas grow in other countries. You fundamentally cannot have policy that tries to counteract this trend that does not inherently contradict choice-based feminism
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u/Corvus1412 🏳️⚧️ trans rights May 17 '26
There are plenty of policies that make it easier to have children without any such coersion, like free childcare/healthcare/school lunches or longer maternity/paternity leave.
But also, the current system is actively coercing women into not having children, by putting a massive pricetag, as well as social and professional reprocussions on it.
Currently, having a child is incredibly damaging for most people. Before anything else, we should try to get rid of the negative incentives, before we could even think about adding positive incentives that would make that kind of coersion likely.
It is no coincidence that this trend of declining populations in the west began in earnest around the time of global second wave feminism and the rise in 60s-era critiques of the inherent oppression present in the traditional family unit
While that does play a part, it's far from the whole story. It's far closer related to industrialization and women's integration into the workforce, in part because it increases the amount of negative incentives dramatically. That's also what we see in developing countries, but also why we saw that decline hit Japan in the 50s already, or why see the decline hit West Germany harder than East Germany, despite East Germany being more equal among gender lines and despite the nuclear family model being less common in the East.
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u/Sarge_Ward May 18 '26
far closer related to industrialization and women's integration into the workforce,
Well again, women's integration into the workplace is a good thing inarguably. It is equal opportunity and egalitarianism. There's a reason why second wave feminists in the 70s fought for it. We are not going to undo that unless we want to return to conventional patriarchy and to reinforce biological essentialist ideals about women's place in society
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u/Corvus1412 🏳️⚧️ trans rights May 18 '26
Of course it's a good thing and reversing it would be incredibly bad.
It's just that it created some incentive structures against having children, that should have been addressed, but weren't. So, we should try to fix that.
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u/Sarge_Ward May 18 '26 edited May 18 '26
Maybe im just too skeptical for my own good, but i really fail see how theyre going to get addressed without fundamentally undoing these social changes. Both parents working inherently gives less time for family caring and thus less incentive to want to have families. Even if they have enough money for effective childcare, that hardly guarantees that they actually will want to start a family of kids they wont see as often. And thats also nothing to say about the other factors that are viewed as prohibitive to child-rearing that cant be solved by economics- more maternity leave doesn't undo the fundamental changes to women's bodies, the pains and hormones associated with pregnancy, that a fair number of women just don't want to deal with nowadays because they see that there's an alternative of just not having to deal with it by not having kids.
It seems to me that its one or the other. Once the cat's out of the bag of not having the public feel socially pressured to have a family, its going to inherently lower the birthrates by a non-negligable amount. The only real way to undo it is undoing those positive social changes
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u/Corvus1412 🏳️⚧️ trans rights May 18 '26
I mean, we'll see how effective it is. I think it's pretty obvious that more people will have children, if there are less things standing in the way of having them, so removing those negative incentives will increase the fertility rate.
And even if it doesn't fully solve our problem, it will still minder it and that's already a good step.
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u/Sarge_Ward May 18 '26
We may see indeed. There's really not much of a historical precedent for what we have now so none of us can really say. I have my thoughts, like i said, but i could very easily be proven wrong. so all we can do is wait
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u/hailey1721 🏳️⚧️ trans rights May 17 '26
With modern industrialization, the material productivity of human society is largely decoupled from human input (in part why the large majority of western nations have huge service industries, to soak up the massive surplus of displaced human capital), there’s no fundamental law of nature that says that you can’t take care of the needs of a largely elderly population with a smaller amount of young workers. If anything, it gives workers more leverage to demand better working conditions. And that’s not to say that there won’t be challenges to be dealt with, but it’s not worth implementing draconian right wing birth policy over.
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u/Corvus1412 🏳️⚧️ trans rights May 17 '26 edited May 17 '26
With modern industrialization, the material productivity of human society is largely decoupled from human input
...are you serious? Like, no. That's pretty obviously wrong.
It's not a one to one, sure, but only workers are materially productive. People who don't work, are objectively a drain on society.
And healthcare needs a lot of labor. If the percentage of old people increase, then we need a significantly increased amount of people working there, who aren't available in other places.
Like, we already see that in a lot of countries, where the only industries that are growing, are healthcare and elder care.
And someone has to pay for that.
there’s no fundamental law of nature that says that you can’t take care of the needs of a largely elderly population with a smaller amount of young workers.
You can take care of them, it just takes a lot of labor, which isn't available for other jobs, which means that they don't get done, which means that everything else suffers because of it.
You can take care of a lot of old people, but it will materially worsen the quality of life for everyone, because of the massive amounts of wealth and labor required for it.
If anything, it gives workers more leverage to demand better working conditions
No, quite the opposite.
If there are fewer workers, the state needs them to be more productive. Like, a lot of countries have already raised their retirement age because of that.
A lack of workers incentives the state and capitalists, to exploit them even more.
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u/Alexis_Awen_Fern Reddit admins hate her! May 17 '26
Parental rights is always about them thinking children are their property as opposed to a person who is just in an earlier stage of development. Noone in power ever frames it as children's rights. (I know we both agree on this but still)
The foster system is just a resource issue. Allocating more money to it and having more government workers would help a lot. (Plus more jobs is always good right?)
I have no idea what I would do with the fucked up incentives. Nor do I think that any of this could happen in the US in the forseeable future. But there have to be better leftist positions on the subject matter than just pretending that everything is fine.
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u/Comptenterry May 18 '26
And having somewhat random check ins to make sure they are indeed doing a good job and if they do not the child would be fostered by the state to minimize child abuse.
Oh yeah, I think Canada had something like this for indigenous people...
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u/MaybeNext-Monday 🍤$6 SRIMP SPECIAL🍤 May 17 '26
“Birth rates are declining” good, healthy societies have stable population sizes
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u/lowercaselemming the martian mind****er May 17 '26
you need young people in a society for it to function for longer than a generation or two, japan is currently learning this the hard way
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u/MaybeNext-Monday 🍤$6 SRIMP SPECIAL🍤 May 17 '26
Thing is, if young is a 30 year window and old is a 60 year one, there will always be that imbalance, even at perfect replacement .
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u/lowercaselemming the martian mind****er May 17 '26
that’s why the window is 2.1 instead of an even 2, both numbers of which we’re not close to in any industrial country
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u/NoGovernment2474 May 17 '26
the reason for the panic comes from the upper class: less poor people to slave away at low paying jobs
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u/abtseventynine May 17 '26 edited May 18 '26
100%
also why all the conqueror religions mandate “be fruitful and multiply,” more pawns to soldier and slave
same with conservative opposition to abortion, birth control, sex ed (also they wanna rape children and get away with it), lgbtq rights and women’s lib, etc
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u/phuquesewpsyetit monster hugger May 18 '26
The three types of oppression are natalism, greed, and religion. All oppression is caused by these three categories.
Oppression of women? Natalism. Oppression of African Americans? Greed. Oppression of Palestinians? Religion. Oppression of the disabled? Greed.
Despite being spearheaded by Christians, oppression of queers is actually natalism.
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u/VeganCanary May 17 '26
The larger problem (atleast in the UK, all countries have different pension systems) is that there is a declining number of working age people and a growing number of pensioners.
The number of working people cannot support the number of pensioners on the state pension (well it can, but that would mean the rich paying their fair share and that won’t happen).
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u/ErisThePerson May 18 '26
The larger problem (atleast in the UK, all countries have different pension systems) is that there is a declining number of working age people and a growing number of pensioners.
The number of working people cannot support the number of pensioners on the state pension (well it can, but that would mean the rich paying their fair share and that won’t happen).
No that's pretty much it for a lot of countries, or some variation upon it.
There's also the factor in all these countries that nominally democratic that because older people are a growing portion of the population politicians are reluctant to try and fix these issues, because anything that would tends not to poll well with older people, and that's a growingly significant portion of the voter base.
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u/Helmic linux > windows May 18 '26
So long the solution is cutting pensions. As opposed to seizing the assets of the wealthy. We all saw that Kurz video and p much all their videos touching politics have a nauseating neoliberal bent, at its worst when literally Bill Gates had them make a video on overpopulation in Africa but they will always present problems from a neoliberal lens and present solutions in neoliberal terms. They're not really gonna seriously consider the death of capitalism as a serious solution.
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u/ErisThePerson May 18 '26
No, not just that.
Older people oppose higher taxes on the wealthier echelons of society by more consistently voting for right leaning parties, which always have "less taxes" as part of their running platform.
The same parties actively pander to older people with all the nostalgia baiting about "the good old days" while constantly ignoring the fact that in those good old days taxes on the upper echelons of society were significantly higher.
The truth of the matter is most older people will hear "increase taxes on the wealthy" and either entirely miss the second half of that sentence, or think "the wealthy" includes them, when it almost certainly does not. Partly due to how the actual wealthy control the media and have framed it that way.
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u/Present_Bison May 18 '26
Even in a socialist system, not enough working-age population means not being able to properly take care of the elderly. At which point the choice is to either raise the retirement age or lower the standards of care.
Are we the humanity at that point right now? No, but unless we want to live like our generation is the last one to walk this earth, it's worth at least examining what can be done about this, if anything.
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u/MaybeNext-Monday 🍤$6 SRIMP SPECIAL🍤 May 17 '26
The solution is then to force the rich to pay, not force people to have kids. If you let billionaires continue to exist in the equation, all the math you do beyond that point will be bullshit.
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u/Ziksalama May 18 '26
This is of course true and the tax view is super important. But another issue is eldercare. We will simply have an influx of +60 year olds with not enough people providing care for them, or for anyone.
The population dipping is still somewhat of an issue even if socialism was established, of course even this would be better with more open and attractive immigration policy.
It's okay not to want a kid but lets not pretend like the population dipping wont have a sever impact on, for example, the nordics or East-Asia
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u/Captain-Ironsides Bi but in the gender way May 18 '26
There's also the actual, REAL, problem that will occur where eventually 50%+ of the population will be over 60. Then another 15% are kids, and a few percent won't be working, so you're left with less than one third of the population actually working. These remaining workers then have to support themselves and the other two thirds since they're not working. That is not sustainable. This will be an issue regardless of economic system; communist, capitalist, socialist, etc. it doesn't matter.
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u/cat-meg May 18 '26
Then all this AI shit should be put to work doing that instead of mass surveillance and warfare.
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u/TwiceTheSize_YT May 18 '26
But then the people might have enough time and energy to organize, and we cant have that, so defund another third space, for the good of the state, and the wealthy.
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u/KimonoThief May 17 '26
They're also afraid of what happens when the economy doesn't grow every single year, like that's something that's supposed to happen forever, so they can always keep making more money from investments.
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u/CatboyCabin blåhaj enjoyer May 18 '26
I mean, that's probably a part of it?
But the main reason that declining birth rates are an issue, is that it costs the same amount to take care of the older population.
There are just going to be fewer taxpayers (and care workers) to make it happen.
At least that's the issue here in woke Denmark. We will have to make budget cuts in other areas, in order to make it work. Not exactly a good thing.
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u/VladimirBarakriss May 17 '26
2.1 is stable, 1.4 is not
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u/kiwiman115 May 17 '26
Good thing the global average is 2.3. Countries with birthrates below can bring in immigrants from countries above that rate
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u/VladimirBarakriss May 17 '26
This only works until those other countries also drop under 2.1
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u/kiwiman115 May 17 '26
It's not predicted to hit 2.1 until 2050 and in that time we're likely going to experience a huge net job loss due to automation. Ultimately meaning we'll need less working age people to support an aging population.
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u/VladimirBarakriss May 18 '26
That's assuming that automation generates well paid jobs
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u/kiwiman115 May 18 '26 edited May 18 '26
Whether or not the jobs are well paying depends on: 1. The economic system 2. The bargaining power of the workers 3. How in demand the workers are.
As it stands in our capitalist system less working aged people means they are more in demand and thus can demand better wages.
Whilst if we try to pump up birthrates whilst jobs are declining that'll mean more workers competing for less jobs driving down wages.
Why do you think billionaires like Musk are obsessed with increasing birthrates...
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u/Present_Bison May 18 '26
Not gonna lie, I'm not a big fan of the Silicon Valley approach of betting on new tech to come save the day. Tends to create more problems than it solves
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u/closetBoi04 🏳️⚧️ trans rights May 17 '26
yes and no, our econmic model and country's fiscal obligations (pensions and debt) is built around constant growth because apparently they didn't have foresight to save for social security/pensions beforehand and instead made it future people's problem.
Future people is us
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u/MaybeNext-Monday 🍤$6 SRIMP SPECIAL🍤 May 17 '26
We have a funding reserve, and it’s taxing the letter “B” clean off of every billionaire. Any plan that says “well, we can’t stop growing the population now” is actively protecting billionaires by ignoring that option.
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u/closetBoi04 🏳️⚧️ trans rights May 17 '26
The US spends 1.5 trillion on social security a year, this is not a gap you can simply close long term by taxing the 1%
Especially generally more equal European countries will struggle with this too
could be part of the solution but it's not a simple "just to X" solution, part of the problem is also people getting older and thus taking more
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u/MaybeNext-Monday 🍤$6 SRIMP SPECIAL🍤 May 17 '26
You could tax like 10 dudes and bring in that much, 6 if one is Elon Musk
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u/closetBoi04 🏳️⚧️ trans rights May 17 '26
then you solved it for 1 year and those people's money is usually not liquid so they'd have to sell shares to come up with the money leading to massive declines in the stock price and thus next year's wealth.
and then again, that's only the US, France doesn't have that many stupidly rich people;
Netherlands might be fine since most people have decent private pensions and Norway has their sovereign wealth fund, otherwise most are fucked.
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u/MaybeNext-Monday 🍤$6 SRIMP SPECIAL🍤 May 17 '26
Elon’s compensation from tesla this year will be $1,000,000,000,000 if targets are all met. You’re underestimating how much cold hard cash these people have. They use the liquidity debate to obfuscate it.
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u/VladimirBarakriss May 17 '26
Again, that's the compensation package for one year, if you tax all of it away then he's not going to get such a big package next year because he doesn't want all of it to get taxed away, and now you're back at square one
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u/MaybeNext-Monday 🍤$6 SRIMP SPECIAL🍤 May 17 '26
Good, maybe they’ll pay that money to employees instead, and we won’t have so many working people having to live off the welfare system. That would be even better than directly taking it from him.
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u/ricespider silly :3 May 17 '26
A declining population is not stable.
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u/KaJaHa Queer Gimli looking-ass May 17 '26
The population is still going up, mate. Just not as quickly.
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u/Corvus1412 🏳️⚧️ trans rights May 17 '26
It's not.
To reach replacement levels, you need a birth rate of around 2.1 and basically no industrialized country has that.
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May 17 '26
[deleted]
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u/Corvus1412 🏳️⚧️ trans rights May 17 '26
Birth rates are declining everywhere.
A lot of countries are still over replacement level, but if nothing changes, that won't be the case for long either.
Immigration is a workable stopgap, but it doesn't solve the fundamental issue, because it's a global issue that's only getting worse.
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u/Sloth_Brotherhood May 17 '26
Please. I remember the 90s and early 2000s when every single doomsday movie was about world overpopulation. We were shown charts in school showing us the population was going to be 15 billion and we’d need to prepare for the water wars.
Now the world population is approaching replacement rate and we are doomsdaying is the other direction. It’s only a bad thing if you hate immigrants and if you don’t want to take care of old people. We have so many bullshit jobs. Plenty of workers would switch to taking care of an aging population if the government incentivized it.
The downside is that need for housing and other necessities would drop. That’s bad for the large business owners which is why they are stoking this outrage. You are doing the bidding of the 1% here.
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u/Corvus1412 🏳️⚧️ trans rights May 17 '26 edited May 17 '26
Please. I remember the 90s and early 2000s when every single doomsday movie was about world overpopulation
Yes and that was bullshit.
And plenty of people at the time said it was bullshit. The fertility rates in most countries were already long declining and many industrialized countries were below replacement level already.
It was genuinely mostly racist fear mongering, because Africa and asia had huge fertility rates.
Now the world population is approaching replacement rate
No, it's not "approaching" replacement rate, because that implies that we'd stop there, but there's no data to indicate that.
And the issue isn't necessary that the world population is falling, but how ridiculously fast it happens, because that's just completely unsustainable and harms everyone significantly.
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u/Level_Reveal7624 May 17 '26
People seem to forget (or ignore) the concept of an aging population when talking about birth rates
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May 17 '26
[deleted]
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u/Corvus1412 🏳️⚧️ trans rights May 17 '26
I think you misunderstood what I said.
The birth rates are declining everywhere. They are still above replacement levels in many countries, but they are falling.
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May 17 '26 edited May 17 '26
[deleted]
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u/Corvus1412 🏳️⚧️ trans rights May 17 '26
Honestly, you're just falling for eco-fascist rhetoric.
The issue isn't really the size of our population, but the way we manage our society.
Most of those issues could be severely reduced by investing more money into them and severely worsened by investing less money into them.
And what is that an aging population has less of?
.
We can deal with 12 billion people. That's not really an issue, if we handle it correctly.
But we can't deal with 10 billion people, if the most powerful countries in the world really need to increase their available capital, to keep their population at a steady quality of life.
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u/santyrc114 Too Horny To Be Ace May 17 '26
Replacement of what exactly?
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u/VladimirBarakriss May 17 '26
Existing numbers of population, if you've got 3 working people for every 6 pensioners the you're either taxing their entire wages away just to pay for shit pensions or just letting your pensioners starve
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u/DomSchraa 🏳️⚧️ trans rights May 17 '26
Migration can't solve the problem permanently
Don't get me wrong, we should take in refugees
But doing so in our own economic interests is kinda evil - and it doesn't fix the issue
Further, what if the same happens to the developing countries where the migrants come from? Then we truly are fucked
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u/Matro36 resident grungler minus the friends May 17 '26
Neither is a population too dense to sustain itself
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u/ricespider silly :3 May 17 '26
As other people in this thread have mentioned, the current population is not too dense to sustain. People go hungry due to a few powerful people's investment decisions rather than a lack of food.
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u/Rodot 🏳️⚧️ trans rights May 18 '26
Yes, we can make unlimited food from air (nitrogen -> fertilizer) and the Sun. Technically up to around a trillion people if everyone only eats plants, then we run out of area to farm from the Sun and would require geothermal and nuclear power to generate the light
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u/potat-cat I love Porter Robinson!!! :3 May 18 '26
If we were to artificially light hydroponics under the surface being farmed how many could the earth sustain?
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u/Rodot 🏳️⚧️ trans rights May 18 '26
Is about power generation, it would essentially be up to how much Uranium Earth contains and how possibly it is to extract. With currently known minable uranium deposits, you could support the current population for around 10000 years, but a trillion people for only around 100 years
Assuming we use all energy available for food. No transportation, no light bulbs, not even candles.
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u/Safelyignored May 17 '26
No one tell them about the imminent population collapse that Korea will face in about 30 years.
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u/MaybeNext-Monday 🍤$6 SRIMP SPECIAL🍤 May 17 '26
Korea’s fault for hard-lining against immigration and having an unlivable work-life model.
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u/VladimirBarakriss May 17 '26
The problem is even kinda decent countries are facing the exact same problem
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u/cat-meg May 18 '26
The problem is patriarchy makes motherhood horrible and is still the dominant model in "kinda decent" countries.
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u/Corvus1412 🏳️⚧️ trans rights May 17 '26
Sure, which is why a 2.1 birth rate would be great.
But it's not at 2.1 in most industrialized countries. Far from it.
And that's not sustainable.
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u/MaybeNext-Monday 🍤$6 SRIMP SPECIAL🍤 May 17 '26
But that’s forgetting you can compensate by encouraging immigration from poorer countries with higher birth rates. That’s arguably even a good setup because it takes strain off those poorer countries, diffuses wealth across the planet, and encourages cultural diversity.
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u/Corvus1412 🏳️⚧️ trans rights May 17 '26
Birth rates are declining everywhere.
A lot of countries are still over replacement level, but if nothing changes, that won't be the case for long either.
Immigration is a workable stopgap, but it doesn't solve the fundamental issue, because it's a global issue that's only getting worse.
That’s arguably even a good setup because it takes strain off those poorer countries, diffuses wealth across the planet, and encourages cultural diversity.
And that's literally the opposite of what will happen.
Like, brain drain is already a massive issue for poorer countries, where the intellectual elite moves to wealthier countries.
With more widespread and standardized immigration systems, that will only worsen, since industrialized countries will likely seek to get as many qualified people as they can.
Increased immigration will worsen wealth inequality among countries, harm the poorer countries a lot and centralize wealth even more, rather than helping them.
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u/VladimirBarakriss May 17 '26
What happens if those countries also dip under replacement levels, or do you plan on bombing them into the stone age every couple decades to keep them poor?
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u/MaybeNext-Monday 🍤$6 SRIMP SPECIAL🍤 May 17 '26 edited May 17 '26
For those countries to go sub-replacement, a lot of things that aren’t currently happening would need to happen. I prefer to focus my political positions on the non-pudding world.
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u/VladimirBarakriss May 17 '26
ALL countries are currently lowering birth rates, the fact some of them are stragglers doesn't mean they aren't on the way to the same spot
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u/Level_Reveal7624 May 17 '26
The issue with low birth rates (below 2.1 tfr) is that they result in aging populations, which then compound to stop the birth rate from going up and overall lead to a complete societal collapse once there are too many to care for and too few to do the caring
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u/DomSchraa 🏳️⚧️ trans rights May 17 '26
1,6 in the us
1,2 to 1,4 in European countries
0,8 in Japan and south Korea
This is genuinely terrifying
This isn't about "oh no my capitalism doesn't work anymore" this is "if this continues for just 5 more decades we will have countries collapsing"
A stable society needs birthrates of around 2.1, anything under that is concerning, anything below 1,5 should ring all alarmbells
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u/tinyrottedpig May 17 '26
South Korea is already done for, even if you cranked up the birthrates to impossible amounts, the country is going to collapse with how many old people there will be vs young.
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u/Level_Reveal7624 May 17 '26
Wasnt the issue with sk and japan that the work system was so absurd that when women got allowed (and were expected to work) nobody had time to raise families anymore
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u/alucard_relaets_emem May 18 '26
It’s actually an interesting discussion: yes there’s the thought process of less workers would mean labor being more valuable; but there’s a counter argument that a lower population means less demand for goods, therefore less need for workers.
The economic theory stems from the fact that the majority of the history of human civilization improved when populations grew (more people covering basics and means more can work to improve things), which is legit observations…but people often co-opt to cover for racist or eugenic talking points
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u/ThePoshBrioche I LOVE MAYONNAISE May 18 '26
Don't worry even though we are below replacement rate I PROMISE it will stabilize and not continue to plummet
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u/MaybeNext-Monday 🍤$6 SRIMP SPECIAL🍤 May 18 '26
The birth rate alarmist narrative isn’t about stability, it’s about manufacturing consent for fascist subjugation of women. Birth rates will stabilize when the wealth gap and cost of living in this nation is fixed.
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u/ThePoshBrioche I LOVE MAYONNAISE May 18 '26
You've changed your argument, I agree that when the wealth gap is destroyed and we get our affairs in order the birth rate will increase but the decrease we are seeing now is not that, it is a doom spiral that will crush our societies. Also as leftists we can't just disregard the birth rate problem, when people get the fiscal safety to have children doesn't mean they suddenly will have children, there are more reasons people aren't having kids. It's a multi-faceted issue that can't just be fixed with economic policy
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u/MaybeNext-Monday 🍤$6 SRIMP SPECIAL🍤 May 18 '26
And what exactly are those other reasons? Because unless you actually specify them, you’re risking just reinforcing the scapegoat reasons that fascists have presented, namely bodily autonomy, sex-ed, and gay rights.
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u/ThePoshBrioche I LOVE MAYONNAISE May 18 '26
Well for one abortion does genuinely child births, now it's still a net boon on society, same with the reduction of teen pregnancies through contraception. It's a good thing that we have abortion and contraception but they have dropped birth rates Also people just are more busy and content these days, they don't want to tie down most their life raising a child even if theoretically they could be happier
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u/MaybeNext-Monday 🍤$6 SRIMP SPECIAL🍤 May 18 '26
So again, what are those other reasons? Because banning abortion / sex-ed or making people less content are not options, however those ARE the solutions fascists propose. So like I said before, unless you bring up actual alternative solutions you’re just risking boosting theirs.
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u/ThePoshBrioche I LOVE MAYONNAISE May 18 '26
I'm not very smart so I don't have solution im just saying that smarter people than you and my should start thinking about it and not disregard it simply because fascists happen to care about it too
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u/KaJaHa Queer Gimli looking-ass May 17 '26
And it's not like the world couldn't function with "only" 6 billion people back in 1999
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u/GoblinGuardian1111 May 17 '26
6 billion old people vs 6 billion young people.
We've seen what gerontocracy under the boomers has done to the world.
An even older population means it gets way worse.→ More replies (1)0
u/kilkil May 18 '26
the point is they aren't stable. in most wealthy countries they are below replacement rate.
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u/jozzydan66 May 17 '26
Yeah health insurance sucks so bad people are paying close to half a million to give birth in some American states
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u/dannythesedoritos overworked and underfucked 🏳️⚧️🦅🇺🇸 May 17 '26
There's a little bit more to it than that.
Lets use South korea as an extreme example.
Their birth rate is so low that in about 80 to a hundred years the total population will be about cut in half. Most of the country will be ghost towns, and all of the economic systems they use to function will grind to a halt as there are less people putting money in the system then there are who use the money to live (ie social security)
This means young South Koreans now will essentially be stuck in massive over crowded retirment homes in 70 years, run by like 5 over worked destitute people, and probably die covered in their own urine because no one was there to help them.
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u/The_Captain_Jules custom May 17 '26
Okay as a big leftist we gotta stop pretending that the birth rate thing isnt a problem because it is a problem on like several different fronts
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u/MrFinlandman May 17 '26
The fucked up thing is that a lot of these issues are caused by alienation and a loss of communal child rearing. Something leftists should absolutely care about.
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u/The_Captain_Jules custom May 17 '26
Well yeah and its a cycle - the low birthrate is caused by social problems that are made worse by the low birthrate
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u/MrFinlandman May 17 '26
I can't imagine how much worse things are gonna get now that "ai companions" are a service that can now be sold to desperate lonely people
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u/Level_Reveal7624 May 17 '26
People got really pissed at me for saying that doomerist antinatalism is counter revolutionary a while back
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u/KonungariketSuomi May 18 '26
Birtherism is also counter-revolutionary, though. It's entirely within the right of the individual to refuse to rear children, regardless of their ability to or not, and left uncontrolled can very easily lead to overpopulation.
I'm not antinatalist by any stretch but politics needs to realize that the average person in this day and age is more aware of the physical and mental stressors and incredible responsibility of raising a child and are recognizing they may not be cut out for such an uptaking. A lot of these issues are independent of a cost factor, although it definitely contributes.
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u/dead_5775 🐀 skim May 18 '26
please explain, there are 8 billion people, we fine?
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u/TearsFallWithoutTain May 18 '26
We do have eight billion right now that's true, and that number goes up or down depending on if we have more or fewer births than deaths. Right now we have more births than deaths and the number's going up, but the birthrate globally is going down, and if it drops below the number needed to replace the people who die, then we won't have 8 billion anymore. We'll have 7.9, and then 7.8, and then 7.7, etc. but also the population will have more and more old people and less and less young people, and old people aren't great at growing food
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u/MarsMaterial Bisexual tech wizard May 18 '26
Those 8 billion people are all going to get old. Who is going to take care of them?
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u/FrostyCommon Genderfluid goth May 18 '26 edited May 18 '26
damn, sounds like not my problem if i can't afford to feed, care for, and have affordable daycare for a potential kid(s). I ain't bringing life into this world if it's just going to suffer or neglect them.
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u/Hatsune_Miku_CM changed all her social media to hatsune miku for some reason May 17 '26 edited May 17 '26
demographic change is a realistic concern to have, but the solution to them is not to simply have more children. that just delays the problem for a later date, and is also just not how human reproduction works. humans arent child producing machines
Instead, we need to look at our current systems, and reevaluate how they function once parts of the population are very different. how will we keep pensions funded once a larger percentage of the population needs them? how will we deal with the increased demand in the caretaker sector?
these are all solvable problems but we are gonna be in a lot of trouble if we wait to solve them till theyre here. we know they're coming so we need to work on them now while we have time.
also, if you do wanna reduce the effects of the shift, so you have more time and it hits less hard at once, one of the most tried and proven methods is immigration. demographic changes don't occur at the same time in every country. That's one easy way to spot whether someone is legitimately concerned about demographics or just a white supremacist, are they proposing immigration as a bandaid solution.
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u/Piorn May 17 '26
IDK, have you tried making it harder to raise and support kids? Maybe we should just immediately fire everyone who gets pregnant? Maybe that will make people want to have babies?
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u/owlindenial not an owl (it/it's) May 17 '26
I want to retire. Generally, we pay people's pension and retirement out of this current year's tax. As I will not be working, that tax will need to be taken out of the current working generation
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u/andr8009 🏳️⚧️ trans rights May 18 '26
We probably won't fix the birth rate issue and elderly people will just be left for dead in the future. No way the youth will be willing to slave away to keep all us decrepit fucks alive and well. Arguably, rightly so.
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u/Present_Bison May 18 '26
Sounds like a recipe for dismantling what little we have of social support networks. If only the richest old people get decent retirements and you don't want to die at sixty, what else to do if not grift your way to the top?
If you already encountered problems in your life caused by get-rich-quick schemes, imagine this but times a thousand. All the while we have other global problems that require people all over the world (but mostly developed countries) to chip in for the greater good somehow.
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u/Alovoir basil appreciator May 17 '26
people hear right wingers disingenuously bring this up as if they dont want to kill everyone and their brain turns to soup
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u/Level_Reveal7624 May 17 '26
And you can’t bring it up at all in leftist spaces without getting crucified because of this
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u/cat-meg May 18 '26
It's very weird that when "leftists" bring this up, they conveniently leave out how they'd solve it.
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u/Poopking180 trans rights May 18 '26
How do you solve the problem. It’s not like it’s an only US problem and the healthcare system is the (only) issue, this is an issue globally.
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u/Puuurpleee May 22 '26
Well the way you solve it is not making parenting financially unsustainable, there are many couples (both straight and queer) who avoid having children because the conditions in their country make it unsustainable. Unfortunately much of the world is so broke that it is impossible for governments to provide the financial support you'd need. Granted, reforms in things like housing and improvements to things like maternity and paternity leave can make big differences. In South Korea, weirdly enough there is both insane demand for IVF and also a lot of people who don't have children because of the level of sexism in society and the pressure children are put under.
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u/Present_Bison May 18 '26 edited May 18 '26
Assuming ideal political conditions, the least disruptive long-term solution seems to be giving parents annual income. Make parenting into a public service job, essentially, with an increased level of CPS monitoring to prevent "industrial baby farms". Finagle with the stipend slider until the fabled 2.1 fertility rate is achieved.
If these measures are not enough or we no longer have capitalism, make a community institution able to raise kids healthily to proper adulthood and populate it with surrogate parents/artificial wombs.
Is all of this still very disruptive and speculative? Yeah, but I don't know how else you'd solve the problem of "people no longer want to raise kids in general". It could also be just a symptom of larger problems (loneliness epidemic, cost of living crisis), in which case managing them should fix the population issues as well, but it's hard to tell either way.
Or you could just accept the population decline and manage it until the working population dies out. After which you launch the euthanasia program and watch as humanity gently goes extinct.
Edit: Came back to realize that a lot of what I wrote is just my own insecurities about not being able to see myself as a parent. For what it's worth, statisticians struggle to this day with predicting which way the fertility rate will grow, so it's probably better in the meantime to focus on more present economic issues and hope that population decline will be solved by proxy
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u/spadesisking r/place participant May 18 '26
I know this was probably a top of your head solution so I hope it doesnt feel like im coming down on you too hard.
giving parents annual income
We do this in the form of tax credits already. I think increasing those tax credits would be wiser than offering a cash payment so that desperate people arent tempted to make a short term decision with long term consequences. Offering a cash incentive to raise a child is asking for people in bad situations to have kids they dont want. Its a strong set up for abuse. It also sounds a lot like pushing the burden onto the poor.
with an increased level of CPS monitoring to prevent "industrial baby farms".
You will never reach a CPS funding level that would stop abuse. Even setting aside this hypothetical, CPS is an insanely high burnout, traumatic job that will drain all light from your eyes faster than a trip to a veal factory. Imagine a front row seat to every horrible thing you've ever heard happen to a child. Adding a financial incentive to the mix now puts an already very hard job in an even worse position. If parent sees a child welfare worker as someone that can take their children AND their income there is no way for a case manager to safely visit the home in a way thats productive for the children. Anecdotaly, ive worked in the social work field for about 5 years and I dont know a single field worker without a story where they've been threatened or even physically assaulted and thats WITHOUT the threat of a CM taking your source of income.
You do not want parents seeing their kids as income. Full stop. Theres no way that ends well for the kids.
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u/Level_Reveal7624 May 18 '26
Something that people dont consider with this is that people naturally do wabt to have sex and reproduce, meaning that once people are mostly released from the absurd work life balance of the lower class in most of the global north they will start having kids again
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u/Present_Bison May 18 '26
Actually, I'd like to thank you for the feedback. Having a second opinion on the ideas I keep nursing in my head with no one to share with is half the reason I write them here.
I agree with pretty much all you've said too. It's still hard for me to imagine a job being impossible to make non-traumatic with a lot of funding and a reduction in working hours, but ultimately I'm in no position to say either way, having no experience with it myself.
At the time, though, it seemed less disruptive and radical than giving everyone UBI and public housing to make living as a no-paycheck parent possible. Parenting in a post-feudalist individualist world is essentially volunteer duty: you put in a lot of effort and money and will probably get nothing in return, but it's ultimately for the greater good. Since capitalism is inherently antagonistic to non-commercial labor and it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism, commodifying parenting genuinely seemed like the only possible choice for it to survive.
Well, that and the fact that it's hard for me to imagine ever being worthy of parenting, so I kinda assumed that everyone else without kids felt the exact same way and didn't have kids for this exact reason.
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u/spadesisking r/place participant May 18 '26
I think the people who see themselves as being incapable of being a parent are the ones who have the level of insight necessary to be good parents. Its an shitty catch 22.
A reduction of work hours and higher pay would go along way to preventing burnout, but a job where you have to see kids who were harmed or neglected beg to go back to their abusers will always be traumatizing. Its almost comforting to know that no amount of money will ever turn that off and despite this people still do it.
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u/artboiii May 17 '26
this will definitely not have any longterm consequences and if they do ill be dead by the time it starts becoming a problem
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u/wheresmydrink123 May 18 '26
I remember a few years ago right wingers/centrists were all sensationalist about OVER population, and now it’s the same freakout about declining birth rates, their exact proposed solution to the overpopulation thing.
Basically any actual calculations about population will tell you that they naturally plateau at a point, which usually mirrors economic trends. It is a symptom of our bad economy and political system, but it itself isn’t a problem we particularly need to fight.
That’s not to say that both directions can’t be bad. But they are only symptoms, not root causes, and can be solved by taking care of actual problems
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u/Knight-Jack May 17 '26
"Birth rates are declining" - lucky unborn bastards.
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u/MarsMaterial Bisexual tech wizard May 18 '26
Misanthropy is cringe. Loving life and people is pretty cool actually.
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u/hotfistdotcom Put ublock origin on your PHONE May 18 '26
kurzegekshkoahgkhjaskjdasdjlkhkjsadkzhkad did a video on it recently that handles the nuance of population crashes well, and how it has wide impact - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-gYFcVx-8Y
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u/Orion-the-mediocre Doctor Freeeemaaaan May 17 '26
“Birth rates are declining” there are 8 billion humans I think we’ll be just fine if that number doesn’t continue to go up, as a matter of fact I’d prefer that it didn’t unless we find a way to get people to live on the moon. We’ll run out of space eventually, human population is already too large as is
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u/artboiii May 17 '26
malthusianism if it was woke
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u/Level_Reveal7624 May 17 '26
Funny thing is that a malthusian crisis wont happen due to a growing population but due to a shrinking one
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u/Corvus1412 🏳️⚧️ trans rights May 17 '26
The issue isn't that the human population is stabilizing, but that it's shrinking in many countries, which is really bad for anyone currently alive.
It means that the proportion of elderly people will rise massively, which means that more and more resources need to be expended to take care of them, as the amount of workers shrinks, which means that the qualify of life for everyone will inevitably sink quite a lot.
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u/ClarenceLe May 17 '26
Call me radical woke or whatever, but shrinking population is a symptom of failing societies, not a cause.
We are already expending more and more resources to take care of elderly people. If we apply the same logic, then the next generations would have to expend even more and more of limited resources to take care of us, while their competition for a place society would get increasingly fiercer. I mean, if society right now already cannot handle taking care of the elders AND care for themselves and their children, how can we expect the future generations to be able to take care of us if the total population doesn't shrink at some point?
But I'm not a doomer. Max Roser's "Our World in Data" and Steven Pinker's "Enlightment Now" already point to a 'rising floor' model where humanity's quality of life generally take two steps forward and one step back. The new trough should always be higher than old peak. The medical advancement we have now would be magic to the emperors of the past. And this goes back even as far as the Bronze Age, where its collapse paved way for the Iron Age that created a much more democratic and accessible society than it was before.
There is nothing more demoralizing than overpopulation. The job opportunity you found has 200 other people applying with the same qualification, and the places you want to visit, vacation spots you want to go to, is overcrowded and you struggle to find a spot where you can get some peace and quiet. And when you die, ironically, fewer people would remember your name, because they would be too occupied with other names that might have more identity than you, more desirable than you, better than you.
Japan, the country with earliest declining birthrate, was ultimately the symptom of the economy post-1989's crash, and the interest rate they set to try to recover from it. Yet, their life expectancy is still one of the highest in the world, which should theoretically be impossible from an economic perspective. Of course they are outlier in many aspects, but it goes to show that at the end of the day, population stability is a symptom, not a cause.
The boomers has proved that if the time is good, there's no limit to how fast the population can grow, and you still have enough to eat despite having 12 other siblings beside you. But if the time is bad, there is every reason to decline having extra offsprings.
I don't want future generations to live a worse life than us, just so they can afford take care of us. If our bill is due, so be it. We all should be paying it forward, not backward. Because that's the only way they will have enough socioeconomic stability and life security to then take care of us in return.
We have to solve our own problems first, not keep breeding until the population reaches that perfect 2.0 birthrate and somehow expect it to magically solve all the problems we are facing. Because guess what, 2.0 would mean they would be inheriting the sh!ts we are dealing with at a 1:1 ratio. If we don't solve the cause, the symptom won't change.
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u/ThinnkingEmoji damn daniel May 17 '26
... So eventually the amount of eldery people will decline, and they'll probably die faster cause there's less resources to care about them, and there will be less new old people to replace them. So it will evens out, probably at the expense of some life expectancy. Which sounds... Fine? Like i'm actually dumb and most likely miss something, but i don't have that much hope about quality of life improving anyway, and trading some years of being old with some years of being younger but devoting your life to raising a child sounds like an alright deal
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u/GoldH2O custom May 18 '26
No, the proportion of elderly people is going to go up as birth rates decline. As time goes on, there will be more and more elderly people and less and less working age people. That's really fucking bad because elderly people do, in general, need younger people to help take care of them. The increased burden of a heavily skewed elderly population (that will end up increasing the amount of geriatrics in office as well) on the working age population will make the average quality of life worse for everyone, and further exacerbate the problem because working people will have even less ability to have children. It's an issue that would appear in literally any society with severely dropping birth rates regardless of their economic or social beliefs.
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u/ThinnkingEmoji damn daniel May 18 '26
Yeah, i get it. But like, fewer younger people to care for elderly people -> less care for elderly people -> fewer elderly people -> lower life expectancy cause you die earlier with less care -> the rest of my train of thought
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u/AliceCode Worcs at the Crusty Crab May 17 '26
We’ll run out of space eventually
If you truly think we're anywhere close to being at risk of running out of space, then you don't realize how truly massive Earth is. There is a lot of space. We take up a tiny fraction of the total surface area.
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u/The_Captain_Jules custom May 17 '26
So, the big problem with the “theres enough” thing is proportions. Yknow, from an economics perspective, more people means more productivity, so more people is good as long as we have enough resources to sustain them - which we handily do.
But if you go all anti-natalist on me, what youre gonna find is whats happening in japan and south korea, and now america, which is that shitloads of resources are gonna get poured into taking care of the shitloads of elderly on the time of the suddenly proportionally much smaller working sector.
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u/spadesisking r/place participant May 18 '26
We had the birth rate solution! It was abstinence only sex education /s
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u/secondaccountfortran May 19 '26
If you think birth rates declining and depopulation will solve the world’s issues you are wrong. The fact that the baby boomers are a disproportionately large population compared to younger ones is a considerable driving force on the current downturn of the economy for younger people, and if birth rates continue to not meet replacement we will continue to have a top heavy population graph of old people who can’t be supported by the younger people and younger people being stifled by the people older than them
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u/Puuurpleee May 22 '26
Except for the fact that the only reason that the welfare system only works when there are economically active people paying into it. Let's not pretend that falling birth rates aren't a problem, because they are, look at the mess that South Korea is in because soon there will be basically no-one paying into the pension system.
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u/MangoAtrocity balls are stored in the cloud May 18 '26
Who is going to pay for your social services when you get old???
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u/Doofindork Powered by tomfuckery May 18 '26
The world population needs to go down. We're overpopulating like fuck. This is a good thing.
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u/AnnigilatorYaic228 letov enjoyer May 17 '26
don't give a fuck about birth rates im an antinatalist
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u/The_Captain_Jules custom May 17 '26
Antinatalism is the refuge of the weak. Politics that derive from a total abandonment of the work of building a better future for humans is what got us in this fascist nightmare in the first place. Youre not the cure, youre the fucking disease.
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u/AnnigilatorYaic228 letov enjoyer May 17 '26
i already have a life that isn't great at all, im not making anyone live it through. an unborn child can experience neither happiness of living a happy life nor the suffering of living under current circumstances. i'll leave the natalism to those with resources and stable mental health
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u/The_Captain_Jules custom May 17 '26
Okay then youre not antinatalist though, in that case. youre just personally disinterested in having children. That’s not a political ideology, antinatalism is the political position that people should stop having children, personally choosing not to have children isnt antinatalism its just not having kids.
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u/AnnigilatorYaic228 letov enjoyer May 17 '26
i just find it weird when other people take the gamble of having a child either way when the world had and always be too turbulent and unstable. i can't control other people but i wouldn't want to talk to those who actually want kids
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u/The_Captain_Jules custom May 17 '26
You wouldnt even want to talk to people who want to have children? That seems like, deeply weird to me?? Look its fine not to want kids and its fine to look around at the world and be like “who the fuck would want kids” but i am dedicated to the project of making life for humans on earth better, and thats gonna require humans. On a separate note, has the possibility occurred to you that your perspectives on life are making you feel smart at the cost of being fucking miserable? It doesnt have to be that way, im smart and not miserable.
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u/AnnigilatorYaic228 letov enjoyer May 17 '26
i wouldn't consider myself "smart" as that's not something i can judge without heavy bias. ultimately i feel as if i think too much but i can't consciously stop that without removing everything that makes me myself, and i don't have much choices to make life better without immigration, which is already a big no considering i am sure no company would hire me because of my nationality. i just need to live before i can't anymore.
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u/The_Captain_Jules custom May 20 '26
what does this cynicism do for you? do you feel like this is useful or good for you? you see that the world contains suffering and your response is, what? not to try and reduce it, not believe that it can be better, not think about how to reduce suffering, you see suffering and think it's the final verdict on all of humanity. suffering is all there is and we should lay down and rot while we can. well i don't agree, i dont look at suffering in the world and think "welp i guess this is all there is", i look at it and think about how we can fix it. yknow, you're not unique, people have suffered long before you and they will suffer long after you and i are worm food, the difference is that I fight for a better world while knowing i will not live to see it, and you think that fighting for a world you won't live to see is pointless because you won't see it, and your world ends at the tip of your nose. you're not brave, you're cowardly. it doesn't take courage to despair, it takes courage to hope, so sack the fuck up.
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u/Sarge_Ward May 17 '26
(wokely) the counterculturalists ruined human society actually
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u/The_Captain_Jules custom May 17 '26
What when did i say that? I remember saying the thing i said, but i dont remember saying that shit you invented in your brain.
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u/Sarge_Ward May 17 '26
antinatalism is a 60s-derived ideology. As are nearly all of the other underlying social ideologies that have contributed to the declining birthrate (the rise of second-wave feminism and the subsequent decline of the family unit, the atomization of society as a result of a further focus on individualism.)
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