Look what happened after the plague, 50% of the population was gone.
It broke the back of the Catholic church and feudalism. Peasants got their first pay raise… ever.
I think there’s a comic series about that.
Lower population is generally better for almost all sectors.
But lowering the population means killing people or restricting birthing rights.
Well, I dunno about you, but I’m in no hurry to get children.
The same people having the same offspring, but later, would lower the population.
So long as people die like regular you can stuff all those dreadful fantasies. Unfortunately, malice is not required for this number to go down.
Or people just saying “nah”
People can also just stop breeding. Seems to be happening in a lot of developed countries. Might be slower but I bet the population will level off eventually. Or plummet dramatically from climate change/right wing political policies.
war kills people and is sometimes popular
Population is already lowering in developed nations
Thanos has entered the chat.
Well no. That’s a wildly incorrect take.
Birth rates are already decreasing and are below replacement rate in many places already. Fertility rates are at an all time low. They naturally decrease as income and quality of life increases.
The global fertility rate is 2.2 births per woman. Which is just barely above replacement. In most developed nations, that rate is down in the 1.6 range, well below replacement.
Total Human population is excepted to peak within 50 years and then begun naturally declining, but many countries are already there. China has seen several consecutive years of population decline. India is seeing a leveling off of population growth and will soon decline. The US is increasing solely off of immigration. Japan has a decreasing population. Same with Korea. 8 EU countries have seen population declines over the last 20 years.
If you wanted to see population decline in the US specifically, banning immigration would do it and we’d see a decline in the next census.
Yeah… It’s something that has to happen naturally or really slowly to not be eugenicist AF.
Okay, but retirement is based off there being more people working than not, so in countries with national pensions we’ll have to significantly raise taxes, and in countries without such a system, retirees who are invested into index funds, need publicly traded corporations to start underpaying their employees even more (it’s really eye-opening when you realize people over 55 own 73% of all the resources of the US, from money to stocks to real estate).
Oh no not rich people having less money.
isn’t that specifically the government pentions! social security and somewhat less important to those that have personal retirement accounts?
Sounds to me like we’ll have to do a communism, i.e banding together to help each other out more, to allow people to retire in comfort. The horror!
(Just in case it seems like I’m dismissing anything you said, I’m not, and thank you for your analysis. My main takeaway is that it seems an unavoidable problem)
This is not about communism vs capitalism, its about the ratios. If there are 5 old people for every young person then how are we supposed to take care of all the old people? There’s just not enough manpower.
No, it’s about the scale of society and how we support ourselves in retirement, though. See, if retirement funds rely on, as the guy above me says 1. Companies underpaying their employees and 2. Governments taxing a group of more people in the below generations than there are to support in the top - then those are unsustainable sources of retirement comfort.
So what would be sustainable? Well historically, and in some countries today, old people need family to support them into old age. You would need either your own kid, with their own house big enough for you, or a rich little nephew with a house big enough for all you and your siblings to live in while retired.
Or… We just do the decent thing and take care of non-relatives. To ease the load on, say, retirement homes, we’d need to agree across society to bring the old people into communities of younger adults, and those younger adults would need to check on them regularly.
Sice this requires a community binding together, you might call it “communism.” Though it isn’t necessarily Marxism.
How do nursing homes do it?
Poorly is my understanding
Immigration!
Oh…
Population decline is a global phenomenon. You can’t offset this loss with immigration when the countries people are coming from are also experiencing a population decline. We (in the West) are currently using immigration to offset this loss now, but when the population decline really starts hitting other parts of the globe (as it is projected to do within the next few decades) then that will no longer be a solution.
And this is compounded by people living much longer…
Actually it is a communism vs capitalism thing. The problem arises in both, but the solutions available depend on the system. I reccomend you look up how China is handling its massive elderly population. For example the elderly there have huge public parks and get outside moving and socializing a lot. In big cities it’s common for them to have mid day slow dance meetings in the parks. This is only possible because the government’s priority is not producing profit for billionaires but caring for its people. So it maintains these things and the public transport required to get the elderly there, and the assistance to keep them fed and healthy.
This video is 15 years old: https://youtu.be/SvmV7GRRPq0
When people stay active and a part of their community into their old age instead of sitting in their huge houses alone or in a nursing home they require much less support to keep living.
Another great vid: https://youtu.be/RnCCY2YtVX0
Houses are already kept artificially empty to retain prices. Capitalism always finds a way to screw you over.
I feel like this as well.
increase wages
Hahahaha oh. That’s cute.
If theres a shortage in the labor market, you either fill it with slavery or raise wages.
Americans track record seems to indicate the former waaayyyy before the latter
Raising wages fucks the people trying to retire because their stock holdings lose value. It’ll have to be slavery if you want to continue having retirement as a thing. Ideally colonialism + slavery, just import slaves from countries still experiencing population growth, such as many African ones…
Wait I think something about this idea might be problematic
If you can’t afford to tip, you can’t afford to eat out. Maybe you should get a second job that pays $2ph
When the population was predicted to explode into the 21st century, the news said this was a big problem. Now the population is expected to gradually decline. The news is saying this is a big problem.
Both can be a problem
“Change is a problem”
The news is autistic?
I think you mean to say conservative. People hate change regardless of positivity or level of train knowledge
Booms have market opportunity, and busts have market opportunity.
That said, having too many people to do the work is a lot less dangerous than not enough people to do the work.
The bust comes with a high risk of a total economic collapse. Those houses get cheap, but food, sanitary, and energy security are at risk. Living in a rotting infrastructure is very different than living in an expanding but underdeveloped infrastructure.
Leveling out or a slow population decline would be good in some scenarios. If we’re going from 2.5:1 down to 0.25:1, you’ll end up with another boomer wave, pissed off at the government, ripe for scenarios that make today’s problems seem like an annoying party.
The rotting infrastructure problem is made a lot worse by urban sprawl
What News is saying this?
The Onion of course, onionguy!
That can’t be true, everything the onion publishes, goes through me first, I would’ve seen that, trust me, I’m an expert. So who is spreading this?
Not all news, per se, but I do recall seeing reporting on how a good handful of countries are trying to combat falling birth rates. Like in Far East and Far North countries.
They are problems for different reasons
you all going to say bullshit about retirement, like if fascist around the globe don’t want to take it from you already, no amount of canon fodders you spawn for billionaires won’t change that
The people that want higher birth rates don’t care about higher wages, the environment, or people’s safety.
They just need workers they can milk them until they can’t work anymore. They need these workers to spend all their money so they have to keep working.
They also want to make sure people with a different skill color do not have more babies than them.
I think that’s actually the main reason.
Is skill coloured by the type of skill or by the level of skill?
By rarity.
The endgame of capitalism is slavery.
The early game of capitalism was slavery
Midgame pretty much unions, now mostly a speed bump in the rearview mirror.
Perhaps that should change.
8+ billion people on the planet and people complain about not enough people.
Ponzi schemes aren’t sustainable.
Yeah, people worried about “population decline” are actually concerned about their preferred race/religion losing political & cultural power.
It’s a dog whistle every time
It’s a dog whistle every time.
Population decline isn’t inherently a problem (unless you’re a racist worried about “your people” losing power). Too rapid population decline is a big problem. We’re already seeing the effects: When the sum of birth rates and working-age immigration fall fast enough, the ratio of working-age people to care-needing people also falls. I don’t think I need to explain why it’s a problem that every able-bodied working age adult will be responsible (directly or indirectly) for taking care of more people. It puts more pressure on everyone, and impacts societies ability to care for those in need of it.
A controlled, slow, population decline would probably just be a good thing at this point. However, that’s not what prognoses are pointing towards, and that’s why (non-racist) people are worried.
I was gonna say we could start pushing people out on ice floes when they get past 60, but climate change is ruining that for us too.
Hegemony is the word you’re looking for.
Yeah, always a dog whistle.
Why would I care about how many people are the same race as me? It could only be a problem if you keep racism.
it’s almost like you have your answer already
Worry about population decline isn’t about wanting more people. It’s about wanting there to be enough working-age people to cover the retirement and medical payments of the ones no longer working. We know exactly how many 30-year-olds we’ll have in 20 years and it’s simply not enough. Something has to give and usually the first to go is the benefits for the people who most need them.
That falls back to “ponzi schemes aren’t sustainable”
It’s broken.
The problem with calling it a ponzi scheme is that this would apply in all contexts, even in very basic economies without money. If you have a tribe of hunter gathers and suddenly they have a sharp decrease in their birth rate, they too would have a hard time taking care of their elderly/children.
Or maybe the something that has to give is a minority class of people (the .1%) getting a few percent higher tax “burden”
I highly doubt that would be anywhere near enough even if the issue was only limited to the country with the highest number of ultra wealthy people which it isn’t.
Elon Musk could end world hunger. Full stop. He wouldn’t even notice the dip in his finances. (He offered once, claiming if someone gave him a concrete number, he would pay it, and a nonprofit took him up on it. Surprise, surprise, the whiny little snit backed out.)
They totally could fix the problem. But to those rich shitheads, it’s not a problem. It’s a feature.
Sort of depend on perspective, hunger only exists because there’s no political will to remove it.
We produce more food globally than we consume, and we can multiply it several times with the same cost of space by swapping more meat for vegan crops.
We have plenty of space for everyone to have shelter, the problem is largely due to the issue that most people want to live in a metropolitan area. So the price for living in a highly sought out location increases to unmanageable levels.
A key factor is the big difference between the kinds of jobs you can get in a more rural location compared to the bigger urban centers. Everyone are forced to move to urban locations to study, causing most people to form their first adult social and professional circles around whichever urban location they studied at.
There’s a lot of minor things that needs to be done, what exactly differs by country. But making the rural regions more accessible to live in should be considered across most countries. One simple first step, would be to make remote capable jobs offer their workers to do it all remotely. Government office workers, could quite easily spearhead such an initiative; I bet some people would move closer to nature, if they could hold onto their bread
usually the first to go is the benefits for the people who most need them.
Then this way of life is not worth saving.
When do they teach ‘carrying capacity’ and what happens after it’s exceeded these days?
Ya know, I have vague memories of reading an argument somewhere that the black plague killed off so many peasants that the surviving ones had materially less shitty conditions for a little while, due to scarcity and all that.
Great news, we’re bringing the plague back too!
The actual disease caused by pest bacteria is easily treatable nowadays.
deleted by creator
Facilitated by such space age concepts as washing your fucking hands and not drinking the corpse-water.
That’s “prevention” you’re talking about, not “treatment”, generally considered better, but still.
You must have missed the news. They’re making a new stronger plague now
:)U mean the one in Russia where one of the researchers recently died?
Specifically, the peasants had more bargaining power for better conditions because the absolute decrease in their number made each of them more valuable to the ruling class as individuals. There was an increase in peasant revolts and concessions to the peasantry following the black death partly for this reason.
Peasants only got the ability to leave the land they were bound to to seek better employment elsewhere after the black plague.
This is true in places. There are also acounts of places where all the nobility died and the peasants threw weeks long parties.
Yup, labor scarcity meant higher wages and bargaining power.
We just never get to retire.
By 2030 it’s projected to be 2.0 workers per retiree.
Sounds like everyone shouldn’t have kids then so the kids are not forced to go through the burden of caring for douchebags.
Good idea, but then let’s get rid of the concept of retirement too.
What those „retiree per worker“ graphs always fail to mention is how productivity increased over the same period.
Those two workers today produce about as much as 8 did in the 50s so supporting the retirees should in fact be easier today, not harder.
That it isn’t is because wages didn’t increase proportionately.
That it isn’t is because wages didn’t increase proportionately
Yes, because your wages go to said retirees. Who do you think owns all the companies not increasing your wages?
Seems like it’d be a good place for the last 50 years of gains in efficiency to go.
Time to start taxing the rich instead of worrying about taxing per worker.
Build more housing so that houses are more affordable, bring on the 4 day work week.
Expensive houses just funnels more money into the hands of banks and landlords without providing any benefit to society.
Why did it increase in the 90s and stabilize for a decade?
People forget how much was going right in the 90s, especially in the states. Boomers were in their prime working years (paying into Social Security instead of collecting it), women’s participation in the workforce had hugely expanded, and a decade of strong economic growth and job creation meant more people working, lower unemployment, and more money going into the system. Obviously some of that was demographic luck, but the Clinton economy was actually putting people to work.
The population isn’t declining, though. See for yourself: https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/
Edit: Granted, it is in some countries: China, Germany, Italy, Japan, South Korea to name a few.
The slowing down of population growth is real though. Trend of fewer children is across the board not just developed countries. Current trajectory estimates population to peak out in 2050-2080 and then decline, for some in their youth in next 30 or 50 years may not be that too far to completely dismiss.
2050-2080
Depending on how climate change goes, population might decline by many billions. Hopefully I’ll be dead by then.
Scroll down that page a bit and you’ll find the “Rate of Growth” chart where you can see a clear decline in birth rate increase globally since the 1960s and it’ll only be another decade or so with current trends before we are in genuine negative population growth. And that’s also assuming there are no more pandemics and/or global scale ecologocial catastrophes likely to happen in that time (there almost certainly will be).
That’s not what the given website says. The given source predicts a continuous growth until at least 2100, while the growth rate slowly grinds to a halt but doesn’t go negative. Obviously this is only one possible forecast, others give different outcomes
I think it’s because we are living longer and the effects of lower birthrate will be shown later
Yeah, there will probably be some growing (er, shrinking) pains, but I’m totally fine if the world just wasn’t meant to have 10 billion people on it
More like 10 million. Back to the stone age!
Now that would be a really surprising development!
The right wing family values rural living types seem awfully strange when they are unhappy about the suggestion that we return to 1960s population levels
