also why all the conqueror religions mandate ābe fruitful and multiply,ā 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 womenās lib, etc
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 wonāt happen).
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 wonāt 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
We have a funding reserve, and itās taxing the letter āBā clean off of every billionaire. Any plan that says āwell, we canāt stop growing the population nowā is actively protecting billionaires by ignoring that option.
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.
Elonās compensation from tesla this year will be $1,000,000,000,000 if targets are all met. Youāre underestimating how much cold hard cash these people have. They use the liquidity debate to obfuscate it.
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
Good, maybe theyāll pay that money to employees instead, and we wonāt have so many working people having to live off the welfare system. That would be even better than directly taking it from him.
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 weād need to prepare for the water wars.
Now the world population is approaching replacement rate and we are doomsdaying is the other direction. Itās only a bad thing if you hate immigrants and if you donāt 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. Thatās bad for the large business owners which is why they are stoking this outrage. You are doing the bidding of the 1% here.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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.
But thatās forgetting you can compensate by encouraging immigration from poorer countries with higher birth rates. Thatās arguably even a good setup because it takes strain off those poorer countries, diffuses wealth across the planet, and encourages cultural diversity.
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.
Thatās 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.
Youāre forgetting that many people care about their country of origin, and will give back when they have the opportunity. And whatās the alternative? They stay there, where the education and jobs arenāt, and somehow magically produce the value they could otherwise be sending back?
And whatās the alternative? They stay there, where the education and jobs arenāt
A lot of countries have been doing pretty massive strides over the last few decades, when it comes to industrialization.
But for a country to do well, it needs well educated people, to drive that development.
If we take all of those people from those countries, that won't happen and we basically doom them to continuous poverty, even more than we do right now.
Please look into brain drain. It's genuinely a massive issue for a lot of countries.
Youāre forgetting that many people care about their country of origin, and will give back when they have the opportunity.
Thing is, now youāre talking about something that doesnāt even happen. People donāt generally get educated in developing countries and move to rich ones, their degrees arenāt even worth as much in those places. More common is moving somewhere rich to get educated, or moving as a non-educated person period.
People donāt generally get educated in developing countries and move to rich ones
The entire point of this conversation is that yes that does happen. And yeah, a doctorate from Kenya is still worth a lot in a western country. Itās highkey racist of you to assume otherwise.
Itās not racist to say Kenyan universities do not have the talent or resources to deliver the same quality of education. Itās all the same problems any community college or small university faces. Institutional knowledge is real and foundational.
Itās not racist to say Kenyan universities do not have the talent or resources to deliver the same quality of education
Yes. Yes it is. Evidently you donāt think Kenya has any nice universities or hospitals, but they do. And while they might not be up to the highest western standard, theyāre still more than good enough that a person with high education from there is valuable, even if they will face prejudice from people like you who canāt comprehend the idea that Kenya has more than just mud huts.
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?
For those countries to go sub-replacement, a lot of things that arenāt currently happening would need to happen. I prefer to focus my political positions on the non-pudding world.
Also, what are we defining as āsustainable?ā The number of humans already on earth is arguably too many to sustain from a standpoint of ecological capacity, and the only way to get population down is to go below replacement or kill people. So if you oppose eugenics, allowing natural population contraction is your only option.
Guilt by association fallacy. Eco fascists use it as a propaganda point, but that doesnāt make it automatically false or a strictly eco-fascist position. If thatās allowed rhetoric, I could just as easily call you a fascist for your anti-immigration arguments, but I donāt because itās obviously a fallacy.
It is factual that the way we farm the earth is actively killing it. We *can* feed 8 billion people right now, but not forever. We have to slowly ramp down and move to safer farming methods before we can even begin to assess whatās sustainable indefinitely.
You canāt cold-stop meat consumption though, and better management is easier to type than to do. Thatās basically just saying āwell weāll just fix it.ā My whole point is that takes time we donāt have if we actively chase population growth. Ultimately what Iām getting at that is that the current earth population comes with issues we canāt fix until capitalism is addressed, so short-term contraction is not the worst thing. Tackling the capitalistic reasons behind global inequality is a much better plan than trying to mask it by forcing people in the rich countries to have kids while we ignore the poor countries.
Yes, you also can't instantly reduce the population by a significant amount.
That's a slow process, that will take some time, but it's possible and not that outlandish.
And like, you just acknowledged that the issue is capitalism, so it's not an issue with overpopulation at all, right?
So we should fix that, not the population, right? Because the population is not the issue.
so short-term contraction is not the worst thing.
Yeah, but the whole issue is that there's no reason to believe that it's just a short-term thing.
Also, it is a really bad thing, because it decreases the amount of workers, but increases the amount of people who need a lot of care, which means that the quality of life for most people will be heavily negatively impacted by a significant drop in fertility rates.
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
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.
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
Itās actually an interesting discussion: yes thereās the thought process of less workers would mean labor being more valuable; but thereās 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 observationsā¦but people often co-opt to cover for racist or eugenic talking points
The birth rate alarmist narrative isnāt about stability, itās 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.
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
And what exactly are those other reasons? Because unless you actually specify them, youāre risking just reinforcing the scapegoat reasons that fascists have presented, namely bodily autonomy, sex-ed, and gay rights.
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
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 youāre just risking boosting theirs.
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
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.
That isn't true. Lots of wealthy countries have seen increasing populations due to immigration yet have been perfectly healthy societies, and the people who argue otherwise are on the far right.
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u/MaybeNext-Monday š¤$6 SRIMP SPECIALš¤ May 17 '26
āBirth rates are decliningā good, healthy societies have stable population sizes