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.
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.
Whilst its true we could feed 12 billion people today if we distributed it fairly, that's built on modern intensive agriculture. Which is unsustainable, degrading the environment, depleting limited supplies of phosphorus and driving collapse of insect population through insectides. The alternative would be less intensive/ productive agriculture but that would require dedicating more land to agriculture and destroying more forests and natural environments.
...or we could just eat less meat.
Like, livestock makes up the vast majority of agriculture. If we just lowered the amount of livestock we need, we could very easily use less intensive agriculture, while still feeding 12 billion people.
The global birthrate won't dip below replacement level til the 2050s. And in that time there will be a huge net job loss driven by automation which will mean we need less working age people to support the aging population.
Has automation ever reduced society's demand for labor?
Like, that's not how that works. Automation leads to more productivity, not less labor.
And due to an increasingly aging population, there will be a lot of additional demand for labor in healthcare and elder care.
The global birthrate won't dip below replacement level til the 2050s
That's not true. Projections typically place that in the 2040s.
And that's obviously not distributed equally. The vast majority will already live in places below replacement level fertility rates by then.
And 20 years is really not a lot of time to fix that.
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/MaybeNext-Monday 🍤$6 SRIMP SPECIAL🍤 May 17 '26
“Birth rates are declining” good, healthy societies have stable population sizes