Infinite growth of human population would hit a hard ceiling on earth resources real soon.
People not having babies is a good thing.
It’s not about infinite growth.
Given that not everyone lives to old age, we would expect children to outnumber old people even in a zero (or slightly negative) percent growth scenario.
Karma for them being dicks.
Sounds like a situation that will self correct in a few decades, no?
People think we need to keep growing the population. We’re stuck on a single planet together. If we could live on the moon or Mars it would be a different story, but I think it’s perfectly fine to decrease the population size back to 1980s levels, at least.
And we’re talking about the elderly who don’t add any productivity to the planet too.
Sure, some minority of boomers have a good attitude and want to work for the planet and the future generations, but the reality is that a majority of them have piss poor values and are now a net drain on society.
Not really, unless Gen Z starts having a fuckload of babies soon. Because each generation will be progressively smaller if the fertility rates don’t rise.
It’s not a huge issue in the third world where your kids are your retirement plan anyway so they have a ton more children. In the developed world, we have pension systems and stuff so on an individual level, having kids is likely bad for you financially, you want other people to have kids so you don’t have to spend a bunch of money raising them, but their taxes pay for your retirement.
Just funnel money from billionaires into it and problem solved. We can keep the aame money in circulation, half the population, and be fine. I see no issue with lowering birth rates, and wvery issue with a lack of policy changes surrounding it
Unless there’s some horrible disaster in the coming decades that will kill billions and harm wealthy old people less.
People live longer every decade and the definition of Senior Citizen doesn’t change. This would not be a bad fact on its own…but declining birth rates can cause many issues.
Those juniors are good for nothing either way! oh, wait…
would it be better if the population was growing past 9bn?
There’s a stable population the ecosystem can support and I’m pretty sure 9bn is too fuckin many.
not that I’m volunteering to free up space tho… there’s a whole lot of techbro chuds who think there’s way too many people, but their motivations are pretty genocidal tbh.
honestly we’re fucked in either direction, but I suspect there’s a lot of reasons the population total will go down once the climate crisis starts shifting millions of people around.
yes growth would be better for me so there are more young people to support the old people
I don’t have enough to give so much to old people
selfish prick wants the population to grow so he has more servants at the nursing home
more young people to support the old people
But human labor is incredibly efficienct in the modern day. You don’t need ten young people for every one old person - nine of whom die by their mid-30s - so that everyone doesn’t starve.
But the role of elderly people has changed so much in the last century. On a national scale, they’re no longer master craftsmen or child caregivers or elder advisors. They’re just the base of the consumer economy and the electoral pool.
As democracy fails and the economy becomes more fixated on tech capital than quality of life, they’re marked out as increasingly expendable.
It isn’t that we need more young people so much as we’ve alienated and de-skilled our old people.
Your old people don’t really need any skills when they own most of the economy. People over 55 own 52% of everything in the US. And that’s how retirement works, whether you have a government as a middle man via taxes or the old people have their investments, they have to live off the backs of the young. The investments, after all, are mostly ownership of companies that the young people work for. Companies that do their best not to raise wages so the shareholders (boomers) can have a better retirement.
If people want to retire in their 60s, there needs to be growth happening all the time, until we’ve entirely gotten rid of the need for human labor.
I don’t see a problem.
-Satan
Not even close to true
Okay but you’re looking at more than just white people
It’s because a bunch of African countries don’t have retirement or pensions the way most of the developed worlds do so you have to have kids of your own. In Europe, north America and many Asian countries, we want other people to make the kids that bring the future of the economy, because having kids is expensive and thanks to social safety nets, other people’s kids will end up taking care of you via taxes anyway.
well 1 out of 23 humans checking to see if random internet claims are true is better odds than i expected, well done sir
Maybe true if you’re comparing 60+ to under 5
If you select North America and slide the slider between 2050 and 2080 it looks like a face opening their mouth and screaming.
Its really only Africa that bucks the trend if you Iook region by region.
1950’s America with that flared base!
It’ll be fine. The baby boom our grandparents cane from was an anomaly
The US baby boom is not really meaningful on a global scale
Sure, but only the inner lips of the labia matter
Minora supremacist
Nice vagina
Baby boomers also had more kids than the generation that preceded them. So did Gen X. Millennials are the first to fail to even replace their own population.
They’re slow off the mark, averaging 27-28 for the first child rather than 22.
I am so glad I didn’t knock up who I thought I was forever with in my 20s or 30s. I would be even more miserable now and would have miserable people depending on me.
How to say you don’t understand sustainability without saying you don’t understand it. :-)
So what’s your alternative? Infinite growth?
Term limits on life.
We already have that.
Elderly population falls off quickly after age 80
Not fast enough
Limits on wealth.
Yes, this IS fine. There’s too many people on this fucking planet. The only reason this is considered a problem is because capitalism and the Bible says so.
No other reason. Period.
There’s too many people on this fucking planet.
There’s really not. The human ecological footprint changes enormously by region. Relatively small populations in countries like Qatar and Brunei punch well outside their weight class in terms of ecological devestation.
A much smaller population that lived at this degree of pollution and destruction would be no better globally.
There’s really not. The human ecological footprint changes enormously by region. Relatively small populations in countries like Qatar and Brunei punch well outside their weight class in terms of ecological devestation.
Yeah, uh, the oil produced by those small populations is used in places like China, Europe and Australia too. In fact they export most of their oil, so we all share that blame.
While I half agree with you, that’s definitely not the only issue.
Senior citizens become people to take care of, that won’t/can’t work and I don’t mean that in a “dear God consider the GDP” way, but literally just people who will not be contributing but still require services, in fact likely a lot more than normal.
It ends up being a lot of neglected senior citizens dying in horrible ways.
Senior citizens become people to take care of,
Children need more resources to raise than seniors take.
I suppose if you are just thinking about things like cost of formula, diapers, clothes, education. In terms of time spent, children take less and less one on one time as each year passes. They have a finite timeline of required care.
The elderly become less and less independant, the care they require becomes more and more medical in nature, and there is no timeline. Someone with dementia can require around the clock medical care for decades.
Yes, the medical care is 1000x more than cost of food and things.
An infant requires more constant care than a dying elderly. Parents are on rotation 24/7 for the first year. That’s more than elderly get in hospice.
Moneywise it’s $600k for a child. $400k from parents. $200k from the state for the free k-12 education.
Elderly on average have $200k in savings age 65-74 and spend $155k in medical costs their last 3 years.
Children are more expensive in money and direct labor.
Not really. The unique expense for a kid is education compared to the old, and elder care can easily eclipse that.
The unique expense for a kid is education
Young kids require a lot of health care, tbf
I said unique, old people need a lot of health care, generally way more than a kid. Most kids after birth just have routine checkups and not much else. Infants might get a bit more doctor visits because the parents don’t know if they should worry or not because the infant can’t speak, but generally even those amount to nothing.
Babies more universally need diapers than old folks, and do eat more than an older person, but health care is absolutely bigger for elderly.
Cost per child is $300k, $400k including college. The state (which means workers’ taxes) chip in an average of $17k / year for k-12 which is another $200k. That’s $600k per child, not including the free labor from the parents.
The average savings for someone 65-74 is $200k. End of life costs are $155k for the last 3 years.
So you just said about 20 years of life is only twice that of the last three years of life for your starting figure. Add in college and it’s still not that egregiously more.
You feel the need to add public school costs, but not add in medicare, social security, and other expenses exclusive to old age.
Cost per child is $300k, $400k including college.
Only one in three Millennials have gone to college, so you’ll need to pro-rate this. You’re also talking about a population that begun employment between 14-17, even in an advanced economy like the US. So that cost is offset by revenue, especially in those later years.
Not with modern lifespans, 75-95 take a ton of care and are unable to contribute
Average 64-75 have $200k savings and spend $155k for last 3 years.
A child takes $600k. ($300k from parents. $100k college. $200k paid by state to cover the free k-12.)
yes and theres more old poeple than children, thats like, the whole point of the post??
Since more people in the world are in China and India you are probably wrong about it being the Bible. It is religious texts that encourage more reproduction for religious spreading to the masses and China just has more landmass so more people overall
Low birth rates are a crisis for capitalism, not humanity. And if you count brown countries, it’s not even happening.
Pension schemes are not a biological imperative.
Right now, a crisis for capitalism is a crisis for all of us, because that’s where we live.
Maybe addressing the source of the problem is a better strategy than trying to blame the symptoms?
Sure, and maybe it’s part of what pushes us to something better, but to act like it won’t have effects is not helpful.
Just for clarification, if we’re talking about sub replacement fertility rates then it would be “brown countries” except for India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Iran, Lebanon, UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, Brazil, Mexico, Chile, Argentina, Costa Rica and Cuba and more. Might be an invalid generalization now.
Not really anything to do with capitalism. If the ratio of workers to non-workers decreases without a proportionate increase in productivity, a higher proportion of workers’ time has to be spent catering to the needs of non-workers. That means less time spent not working and/or less time spent producing unnecessary stuff that improves our lives like chocolate or TV shows.
congrats, you’ve described capitalism
if we didn’t need to make corporate profits, communities could look after each other
You do know that corporate profits are literally where old people get their money, right?
Take the posterchild of capitalism as an example, the US. People over 55 own 52% of all assets, from money to homes to companies. As a group they outweigh the billionaire class about 8 to 1 by wealth (and of course most billionaires are themselves also old). That’s how retirement investments work, you live off the backs of young people who work.
Get rid of capitalism, you just get a different way to route young people’s productivity to old people. Hell, get rid of currency and it doesn’t change. Everyone’s producing food and goods, but a large share of it goes to people who are old and no longer work. The larger the share of people not working, the larger the burden on the people not working.
Unless the population is constantly growing, retirement is a burden on young people regardless of economic system.
Nothing I said related to capitalism at all as far as I can see, so you’re going to have to connect the dots for me if you want me to understand, sorry.
we already have enough productivity
why do you think we need more?
I think if we decrease productivity, it will cause problems.
We grow several times more food than humanity can possibly eat. We don’t have a productivity or resource shortage. We have an allocation error.
I don’t think this is true. I checked the stats for caloric supply and the highest value worldwide is (unsurprisingly) in North America where about 3,500 calories of food are produced per day. That is less than double what a person needs per day, so “several times” seems unlikely.
But I don’t dispute the idea that we produce enough food to feed the world. But I also didn’t say we didn’t.
Could you comment on what I actually said, which is that an ageing population (or any situation in which there are more non-workers per worker) will result in less production being available for people on average?
This is not just about food; it is also about other necessities (such as healthcare) but also non-essentials like entertainment. The problem of an ageing population is not that we’ll starve to death; it’s that our quality of life will decrease.
That’s not what I said. That site measures the output of the chain. I said we grow more food (ie plants) than humanity can eat. We feed the majority of that food to the livestock we keep that absolutely dwarfs the biomass of all wild animals. That introduces a 90%+ caloric inefficiency. If we just ate the plants, we would have to stop growing so much food, even all our industrial processes don’t demand that much. But capitalism demands instead that we keep growing more food than the year before, and so it demands inefficiencies like animal ag. Any scarcity is entirely engineered. It’s not an accident, it’s by design. It is necessary to maximize investor return.
No, it’s because people like eating meat. You may have noticed that people ate meat centuries ago before capitalism existed, and favoured it over other foods when it was available.
But I understand what you meant about growing multiples of food, now, so that’s good.
This isn’t just about food, but look at the number of people one farmer could feed 200 years ago (6 or so) vs today (150 or so). We spend a lot of our productive time today doing stuff we didn’t have time for just a couple hundred years ago. We’ve got a long way to fall before we are unable as a species to meet our needs. Proponents of tech advances expect our productivity to increase even if the workforce shrinks. If our standard of living delines on average, either these prognosticators are incorrect or we have a huge allocation issue.
I think it is a problem if we need to have less free time, or work more for the same things that we do in our free time, because a higher proportion of worker time needs to be spent supporting people who are not working. You don’t want to go back 200 years even if humanity could survive in such conditions. (And the present population probably could not survive)
Except for population to grow it requires children which also don’t work, require more resources than elderly, and at the end of 20 years instead of freeing up resources (by dying like the elderly), continue to consume resources.
At the end of 20 years a child becomes an adult, who will (on average) be a net producer. It’s true that children cost more in work put into raising them than older adults take in work to look after them, yet it is a fact of life that one working human is capable of producing more stuff than just that which they themselves needs or makes use of - otherwise it would be impossible to raise children. This should be obvious, and means that the problem of an increasing birth rate, from this perspective, is at most temporary.
But I didn’t say we should have high birth rates, I said that the problems of low birth rates are not due to capitalism.
Land isn’t unlimited. Physical resources aren’t unlimited. For example while a person can manufacture more batteries, with more people on the planet each battery will be more expensive for everyone because each is vying for the same limited resources that are used to make a battery.
I also wouldn’t say that low birthrate is caused by capitalism but by over population. No economic system can sustain unlimited growth. When too many are competing for too few resources, there is no time for families.
You are not talking about what I was talking about, my friend.
The problem you describe as “temporary” implies that once your children are grown, they don’t have further children that will use more resources.
A worker in a growing population can somehow support 4 children and 2 parents (6 dependents) yet supporting only 2 parents and no children (2 dependents) is a problem?
So no, it’s not “temporary”. It’s a pyramid that eventually grows such that the foundation must crumble from the weight of everyone above.
You are still talking about growth. I am comparing two scenarios: one where the population shrinks (and therefore gets older on average) and one where our doesn’t, and remains the same average age. I am not saying we need to grow the population forever, and never have.
I suggest you reread my comments to see where you’ve misunderstood, but it’s up to you.
Not really anything to do with capitalism. If
You think for-profit healthcare, including elder care, pharma care, and long-term care, aren’t a huge problem with capitalism written all over it, with every layer maximizing profits and minimizing services, then I I urge you to re-assess it.
I can’t really connect this comment with what you originally said. Maybe this will help clarify my position: I think countries with public health and social care, just like countries with mainly private health and social care, will have severe problems if they can’t arrest the rate at which their populations are ageing. My comment explains in very general terms why I think that is the case.
Who gives a shit. I’ll be dead.
The tricky part of being in society is that we want systems that work for more than just ourselves: It’s not a purely transactional relationship.
Great news! It doesn’t affect you either way, so we know your opinion on the matter is completely unbiased. That’s excellent.
I don’t think youth outnumber old are sign of good thing either, but you do you.
Even at constant population or even mildly declining, you would expect the young to outnumber the old by a bit. Given people die on the way to getting old and die whole being old more than the young die.
They may be even fewer than when the currently old folks when they were young but still be expected to outnumber the old
you would expect the young to outnumber the old
Kinda depends on how you define the two cohorts.
We’re also overlooking a seminal moment in history where
- Vaccinations
- Nitrogen rich fertilizer
- Fossil fuels
- A sixty year long people of relative global peace
All came online at about the same time, radically improving human life expectancy over two generations.
As a point of comparison, the county of Tibet had an average life expectancy of 35 in the 1920s and 72 in the 2020s.
Why would anyone make a kid is beyond me. More meat for future wars, for warehouses and factories, forcing a life into being just for suffering and misery
Yeah, but as long as I don’t have to, I don’t care. /s
Oh no, who did this? (sarcasm. a few people have gone out of their way to ensure everyone else’s suffering)
Just waiting for Jesus?
In a pretty abstract sense, yes, and it gives me peace.
