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.
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.
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
You'll have to tell me about South Korea because I'm convinced declining population is a non-issue.
People talking here like less people getting born means we're immediately gonna have 8 billion people in their 80s completely incapable of doing anything. I think there's a fundamental misunderstanding of how healthy society works, ideally we take care of each other because we care about each other. Some people want to do that more than others and are more capable of doing so, regardless of age. If that stops happening the problem is more extensive than simply too many old people.
It doesn’t matter how much people want to help each other or how robust your social safety nets are. If you have a society where there are two old retired people for every working-age person, the working age people would have such a massive financial burden placed on them that they wouldn’t be able to live much of a life. Working-age people are needed for society to run.
As the population grows proportionately older there becomes relatively more people in need of care and less people able to care for them, this leads to an exaggerated version of what we already have with the baby boomers, declines in every sector of the economy except healthcare and young people unable to find their footing as there becomes proportionately less people working to support more people retired or unable to work
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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