- cross-posted to:
- memes@lemmy.ml
- cross-posted to:
- memes@lemmy.ml
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Crazy that we live in a world where you can watch the damage of demographic shifts in real time, and that’s still not enough to convince you that it’s a problem.
The modern world doesn’t scale down, and we have yet to figure out a solution.
There are 8.3 Billion people on the planet and there were 7.5 ten years ago. We have enough people. We have enough resources for everyone to live comfortably and be well in their communities. We have more than enough money and other valuable things to trade.
The main thing getting in our way isn’t a low birth rate.
Anyone genuinely concerned with the depopulation of humans in 2026 is probably some flavour of breeder cult weirdo, and the only ones constantly banging on about it in politics, academia, the news, etc are imperialists, industrialists and racist patriarchs. IME.
I agree with you that there are too many people on this world, and yes, we can do with way less.
Having said that
A little bit lower that the 2.1 birthrate is fine, A very low birth rate is very bad for everyone. Sudden changed on demographics will fuck your country up and can make it disappear in a hundred years without you realizing it until it’s too late
Demographics is like a slow moving cargo train, you only hear some humming and then some blaring and then when it hits you it won’t stop or even slow down for a second
Countries like South Korea are at risk for their very existence and really should act now to avoid the day that North Korea can just walk in because they won’t have enough people left to even take care of themselves
China has a similar problem and it’s bad. They have a huge amount of people becoming old and unable to add to the economy anymore and requiring more and more help from others… That means that more money will go out to the old, and there is less money for the young to get kids and add to the next generation. This is in part why there are so few kids these days, it’s simply too expensive to have any.
Lowering your population slowly and carefully is fine. Having your population drop off a cliff like it’s happening in many counties world wide is a disaster
Then good news! Globally we’re still over 2.1
Not a problem unless you were counting on collecting social security
Millenials and younger don’t tend to include retirement in their plans. Death is the plan for us, 100 million in America is all that is planned, should AI not pan out.
The rest of the world, they plan to exterminate.
That last sentence is not clear. Who is planning and who is exterminating? American Millenials are exterminating the rest of the world? The rest of the world is planning to exterminate… someone? Their own population?
Not clear after the Epstein class reveal? The most important discovery of the 21st century?
I don’t know if I plan on being around that long
You could withhold your taxes but doing that would be too large an action for most Americans.
That’s a great way to ensure you won’t be around that long.
That was gonna happen anywy
But what about the orphan grinder? Wont somebody think of the orphan grinder?
cannon fodder for the military.
The machine needs cogs!
If growth doesn’t compensate for shrinking working population, you’ll be fucked. Somone has to work so you have your retirement.
Not really, we’re just being looted and exploited by the ownership class. We have plenty of productivity to take care of everyone: https://www.epi.org/productivity-pay-gap/
Why not make billionaires an illegal thing. Poof! You have money for retirement for everyone
Money isn’t the issue in the end, the issue is that you still need enough people in working age so that you can use the money to get the goods and services that you need as a retiree.
If a large number of people retire without finding any young successor, services just become more and more inaccessible. Like e.g. if there are not enough doctors in your area because many of them retired, you won’t get treatment even with money, because the capacity just isn’t enough anymore to treat everybody. If a car shop closes down because the mechanic retires, you cannot get your car repaired there any longer, even with a lot of money, and so on…
An old society means that the area decays, more and more places close down or cannot get maintained any longer. And money doesn’t help because numbers in a bank account don’t do the real work. There are already a few old regions around the globe where this can be seen
You mean, like robots? We have these hard-codded robots that can work a long time without human intervention.
And they have been a thing long before the LLM crap.
Thanks for pointing that out. A lot of people some seem to realize automation was doing fine before LLMs.
The dark factories don’t need LLMs.
Finally somone who gets it. It’s like economic 101 in school: Money is fundamentally worthless. It can only buy as much as the economy is able to produce
IMO this is an education system failure. You get things like that when you have different skill set in society VS what economy demands. If economy moves towards high tech and you have only unskilled labor at your disposal wages go down. (that plus immigration factor)
If I’m correct, highly specialized workers should get an opposite trend.
I can’t think of anything more irresponsible and selfish than procreation in the 21st century. Why would anyone want to end their own life and subject themselves to the stress of ensuring their craft human survives and becomes a relatively average coal miner.
I’m not going to fault someone who has the means to provide for a child for making that choice. It’s a very personal one, just as not having a child is.
Voting Republican.
Touché
well most countries have below-replacement births anyways.
Become unfuckable.
Way ahead of you.
I make it my personal responsibility in life to constantly bring up the necessity of immigration as the solution to age disparity and population decline. There are working people. There are as many as you could ever need, tens of millions, perhaps hundreds. It’s never going to be an issue which can’t be solved with immigration.
I don’t see how this is a solution so much as delaying the problem for future generations to deal with. What happens when the countries the immigrants are coming from start to face the same issue (if it isn’t happening for them already?) It’s basically the population equivalent of the “one more lane bro” philosophy.
It is absolutely happening already. Many of those countries are experiencing issues with being below replacement and a hollowing out of their workforce at the same time. For many, they have gotten old before they got rich, which will make further advancements difficult.
Dude, immigration is the root cause for a whole range of problems if not done correctly. See prime example germany.
This is the first time I hear this on Lemmy. Usually I hear it on Reddit and if I ask that person questions, they say something like “I saw a black on the bus yesterday and he picked on a lady”
Germany’s a pretty amazing country and the only downsides I’ve seen lately is the rise of xenophobic locals pushing politics to the right.
Add Canada to that as well.
Polite so long as you’re white, the canadian way. Ask a mounty for a starlight tour sometime.
Not in that way there were too many too fast without proper home and healthcare consideration post COVID there is some pull back but the damage is done. Sucks for those immigrating and those here as well.
ah, fair enough
sorry for the harsh reply
Tax-funded retirement is fucked, but like, who still thinks they’re having one.
other than rich people.
All retirements will collapse not just public ones. It’s called the asset meltdown hypothesis.
Old people aren’t investments
Well, with that attitude probably not.
I am more than willing to fix the declining birth rates in every country but nobody is accepting my offers =/
The sperm bank would
i dont think that would solve it, as only well off people can afford ivf, adoptions anyways.
Pretty sure though lemmy users produce the strongest sperm. I’m sure RFK Jr researched it or something
Yay! Less humans to create less suffering!
But think of billionaires’ bottom lines!
I don’t live in the US so mostly I’m thinking of who’s gonna pay for my retirement and healthcare when I’m old.
I’m paying for the current old people’s retirement and healthcare. That’s fine, it’s the social contract we have in our nation: everyone gets taken care of and those who can work, pay a lot of tax to make it happen. If the population decline gets bad enough, there will be no one to do the same for my generation.
Oh and they populist conservatives did a pension reform so you can take out whatever you’ve gathered in your second pillar even at age 20 if you want (at which point it’ll probably be in the hundreds of euros lol) and can’t resume payments (which were matched by the government - you pay 2, 4 or 6 percent and government pays 4% of your gross income) for 10 years. Worst deal ever for most people taking it out if they want to retire at one point. And a third of the population took it out. They now have to fully depend on the first pillar (government) pension, which isn’t based on past investments at all, it’s taken from the working population’s social taxes when you retire. So far more directly affected by the population decline. I’m betting they’ll eventually forcibly fuck it up for the rest of us to pay for the retirements of those who took it out.
You understand that money is a fiction, right? It’s not even numbers on a piece of paper anymore, it’s ones and zeroes.
Fewer people means more resources per person and less damage to the earth.
The “resources” we rely on require (working) humans, less working humans means less resources. The population we have today won’t disappear all at once but when they age out of the workforce, a smaller population will not be able to support them
In other words, if we are below replacement level, we will eventually have a situation where the old outnumber the young, which means that the young have to work harder to support the old
The biggest concern right now is the looming massive unemployment crisis and you’re worried about too much demand for work?
And how does fewer working people decrease resources? Fewer working peole means less land? Less water? Less energy?
The biggest concern right now is the looming massive unemployment crisis and you’re worried about too much demand for work?
It’s a two sided issue. We’re laying off a bunch of people in jobs that require thinking, but not doing stuff in the physical world. But jobs that require doing physical things are still much more difficult to automate if it requires any sort of flexibility to conditions. We’ll still need people in a bunch of roles, they’ll just be jobs people won’t want to do as much, because it’ll be dirtier and harder work. And of course in our present economic system at present time, these jobs aren’t very highly paid since we don’t have a real shortage of workers yet.
And how does fewer working people decrease resources? Fewer working peole means less land? Less water? Less energy?
Land on its own doesn’t produce much useful, you still need people to work it. Power plants need employees too. Etc. There are still so, so many things we can’t accomplish without humans physically present and moving objects. Automation makes things more efficient, but we still need humans.
If the population of the world shrunk evenly in all ages, it wouldn’t be an issue. It’s only an issue because the population is aging.
And yes, in the future we’ll probably have AI doctors, AI teachers and AI engineers to provide us mediocre healthcare, education and help invent stuff. But we won’t have AI electricians or AI plumbers anytime soon. Much harder problems to automate.
Not if the robots take all the jobs
Most countries have billionaires pulling strings at the top.
The only real billionaires of my country are the founders of Wise and Bolt. They all made their money from startups that succeeded internationally and none of them particularly politically active. One of the Wise guys is actually building a car-free “five minute city” block in the capital. The biggest problem is a actually a guy with under 100 million net worth who runs a small bank (called bigbank, ironically), keeps donating to the conservatives and his individual contributions are like 10-20% of the entire country’s political donations put together or something. It’s like eroding LGBT rights is his life goal or something.
All that doesn’t change the fact that since the population is aging, rather than people of all ages dying off evenly at once, things will get harder to maintain, as everything we enjoy in life still requires someone to do work, regardless of economic system - and old people still require resources to maintain (and more labour to maintain than young people)
there are other humans in other countries that are looking for a better life
the problem is that countries with declining birth rates dont see them as humans
It does tend to happen that we’re pretty prejudiced, yes. Personally I’m not and most people I know aren’t either, but anyone who grew up in the soviet era is generally pretty racist towards people of color. It’ll take a few more decades for things to get better I’m afraid.
The oligarchs haven’t figured that out quite yet. They want to starve us out of existence, but still want to pig out at the government troughs. Where is that money going to come from when all the jobs are being done by AI and robots?
they think they can just have robot slaves or humans slaves in thier little enclaves. in almost all cases, fiction media goes, both groups end up rebelling anyways.
The correct answer to the slavery problem is that we, as homo sapiens, enslave the sun. How, that is still a bit of open question… but the seeds have been planted already.
See that’s the neat part when it comes to tech oligarchs, specifically. They believe in TESCREAL/Transhumanism so they’re aiming to become the AI robots! YAY! /s
trying to be at end of hal9000, where it fuses with the human to become “god-like”
Then we turn them off.
By the time things reach that point, it could be too late. TESCREALists are like planetary eugenicists. You know how Thiel couldn’t answer the question about whether humanity should live in that one interview? He’s not the only one. Their fantasy of what comes next will never work, but that doesn’t mean they won’t do unfathomable harm to the globe trying to make their sick dreams come true.
So far ai seems pretty horrified by them,I don’t think they will be well received should we actually create real ai.
Their plans don’t include money like we have it today
More like:
Without humans Who would pay rent/dividends?
Billionaires today will be long dead before it becomes a problem.
I hate to break it to you YuckyTom but no matter how you slice it a declining birth rate means a shittier situation for you in your retirement. Most people who think about anything other than retweets and boobs care about this.
That’s an awful reason to have children.
How about “Declining birthrate means a shittier situation for all retirees” Sounds better?
I can assure you that our endless growth model will make things really shitty by the time I retire. In fact, it’s possible our endless growth model has already made my retirement irreperably shitty.
retirement
lol. lmao even
Ok, imagine I said twilight years.
You may not “retire” but inevitably there will be a period before you die where you are less productive and generally less able than you previously were.
When you reach this period, the more people there are being productive and paying taxes the better your circumstances will be.
Yeah, in my “twilight years” I will be kicked out in the street and die from exposure either way
if people make it that far.
lol twilight years. Us millennials are all dying before 60.
The more people there are being productive, the better off the billionaires will be. You are going to be fucked regardless.
Sure but aren’t you interested to know that you’re going to be more fucked than previously forecast?
Don’t you want to be less fucked?
I don’t think it matters much. My generation will have to come up with a retirement plan on its own and whether the government can cover 0, 10 or 20 percent of the basic cost of living makes almost no difference to me. I expect that I will basically have to cover everything on my own or maybe go to jail for free food.
going to jail for *free food
*slave labor is free, right?
I don’t live in a third world country like the US :) Slavery is not legal where I live, no exceptions.
You’re forgetting the positive declining birth rates bring to retirement - a lifetime of higher wages. In a society with few young workers, those that can work make bank.
Retirement is as realistic for me as finding an actual pot of gold at the end of a rainbow. I’m going to die either at my workplace or right before or after being at work.
Unless you’ve already retired, you likely never will.
Sorry?
I acknowledge that things are perhaps more difficult than they ever have been, but “no one gets to retire” is unnecessarily gloomy.
“Fluffy, fetch ball!”
You mean suicide? That’s what I’m reading from these comments, that these people plan to off themselves.
I would call working into your 70s “involuntary suicide.”
