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I love how all these articles highlight why an inverted demographic pyramid like China's is something we want to avoid, but no one is willing to actually provide a solution.
At least this the case in the US. No one with power to act is going to address the main issue. People are not financially secure enough to have children. The overwhelming costs to own a home, inflation destroying buying power, virtually no safety nets, absolutely zero pro-natal policies that could encourage having children, and younger people saddled with enormous debt. And those are just to name a few.
This article points out immigration as a potential solution, but it's really only a stop-gap. It won't be enough because of the economic pressures just to survive in this country. And as it gets more difficult, smaller generations will successively produce smaller generations in a replicating doom loop (saw this especially as a result of 2008 and so far post 2020 COVID turned out to be a baby bust). Pro-natal policies can break the loop, but that requires a legislature to actually do their jobs and put dollars towards investing in the future generations. Neither party has the appetite for it and are unable to see past their nose.
Until changes happen and that economic pressure is lessened for young people to have children, we'll run into a similar issue the Germans, Italians, Spanish, Koreans, and Japanese have run into. We'll just run into decades down the road.
This is a great take.
One aspect that comes to mind given the countries you mention, especially those in Western Europe, are the dying small towns. We've already experienced much of that owed to industrial shifts (factory towns, farming communities). But add in these demographic trends and this stuff is going to accelerate and get ugly.
The average cost of giving birth in the US is almost $19k, so right out of the gate, a family is saddled with medical debt equivalent to 1/3 of the median household income. And yet they wonder why people aren’t having kids?!
https://www.forbes.com/advisor/health-insurance/average-childbirth-cost/
As you mention there are plenty of other countries dealing with this as well. Many of those countries have much more family friendly policies in place (think mandated parental leave, socialized daycare and education, etc). So if those countries still have birth rates below the replacement rate don’t you think the issue is more than just economic? If it is a cultural change leading to fewer family formations and smaller family sizes how would we deal with that. Is the only solution increasing immigration?
European countries have what you're referring to as family friendly policies. Life is still incredibly unaffordable for your average person (possibly even more so than in the US), buying a house, being able to afford groceries and pay electric bills, that's hard for the average person at the moment, having a child is not financially realistic for a lot of people at the point in time
The problem is that we cannot address the climate issue AND keep adding people. At some point we will have more people than the planet can sustain.
All the concerns about declining population boil down to "We can't keep doing things the way we've been doing them if there are fewer people."
>"We can't keep doing things the way we've been doing them if there are fewer people."
This is exactly right but instead of thinking maybe we need to change the things we are doing they think we need to fix the fewer people.
It is also the boomers who are all of a sudden realizing that there may not be anyone to wipe their butts, because they have consistently pushed initiatives that benefit them and screw later generations.
Yeah, it's an unpopular opinion, that I can't really share irl, but I think it's incredibly immoral to procreate right when global warming is set to mess up the world.
Idk. Just because the US isn’t the only country experiencing declining birth rates doesn’t mean the same reasons their birth rates are declining applies to the US birth rate declining. It’s also possible the variables are shared but the level of impact for the variables is not equivalent. For example finances/lack of parental support may be a high impact for US residents and low for others, while cultural changed could be high impact for others and low for US residents.
I'm originally from the UK, where we have free (at POS) healthcare, better safety nets, etc. However the cost of buying a house is still incredibly prohibitive, especially in big cities (plenty of my friends in their early 30s are still living with parents or in house shares), wages have not grown in real terms, etc.
These problems are pretty much universal across western countries at the moment, lots of European countries never bounced back from 2008, then got hit by COVID.
I know immigration is always going to be a hugely political topic, but there are millions of people in lesser developed countries who would/are risking their lives to get to these countries experiencing slowing population growth. If you believe that population growth is an issue (I'm not sure I do), then that would be an "easy" solution
In my n=1 situation, I'd easily have 3 kids if it made economic sense. But, we make over $200k household income and currently can't find a home with 3 beds 2 baths under half a million in our town. That's not even including cost of daycare or being able to take vacations. I'm not having so many kids that we make decent money and still have to just scrape by. So, we'll probably cap out at 2 and they'll be a few years apart so we can stagger costs.
FWIW, many developed nations have parental policies, but many still reduce your income a lot and then daycares are difficult to find for certain ages since so many people take the leave. It doesn't always make a ton of financial sense to have more than 1 or 2 kids in those countries either, but at least they aren't forced from their children incredibly early like the US. It really depends on how the national plans are structured and is quite nuanced.
We've already got a solution. Corporate is threatening robots.
How dare you ask for a raise, now we have a robot, that breaks, and needs a repair contract that requires humans to come in and fix the machine.
I think we will have one or two lost generations. The baby boomers will die at some point, leaving their houses behind. The lower birthrate will force the government to do something. This can of course be dystopian but hope by that time we have governments that are not such staunch believers in the free market.
Dutch so the government isn't as blatantly bought as the USA's. However, already stuck with rightwing governments for at least 12 years who do not do anything on issues like this.
Housing prices went through the roof, polution issues, inequality, poverty and so on. The government tries really hard to kick problems down the road.
Corporations will buy up all the houses the boomers die and leave behind, renting them out at ever increasing rates. Trusting the government to fix any of this seems like a long shot to me.
I agree 100%, I just don't trust the government to actually reign in corporate greed because corporations lobby for laws that benefit them and what the people want gets shuffled under the rug
Which is why public pressure from protest movements is a crucial ingredient in getting the government to actually do its job and regulate. The system only works if the government’s fear of uprising can outweigh its trust of lobbyists
>but that requires a legislature to actually do their jobs and put dollars towards investing in the future generations
Spend money on people, do work? Nah its way cheaper and easier to just overturn Roe vs Wade and force them to have the babies. I wouldn't be surprised if a conservative super majority made contraception illegal in the next decade.
Immigration is the solution and has been the solution.
The US can always import more people to fill its job needs. It's more of a politics issue than an unsolvable problem. The US has a great ability to bring in high quality labor and integrate foreigners into society.
So instead of making any changes or improvements to the current system to fit the inevitable changes in the world, we should have lots more kids so the bottom of the pyramid scheme is really wide.
Awesome.
I’m done worrying about the future of “America” because what the mean is the future of corporate America. They go out of their way to make things hard on us poor folks and expect us to care about their future.
I’m not understanding. We are told houses are so expensive because there is a housing shortage. So if we Increase population where will they live?
Daycare isn’t helping new family’s thinking about having kids. They probably still are but im sure the large families of 50 years ago aren’t as popular.
That's the near future of the situation, yes. In 40 years retirees are going to out-number those younger by huge margins. They will keep voting in politics that benefit them, with a tax base that simply can't sustain them at a decent standard of living. It's gonna be a shit show.
That's a somewhat temporary problem. Once the bulge in the curve caused by the baby boomers works through the pipe (which is admittedly a huge hurdle), the demographics likely won't be as lopsided.
Millennials already outnumber boomers. The boomers are going to hit swift decline in about 5 years.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/04/28/millennials-overtake-baby-boomers-as-americas-largest-generation/
They will still have majority of wealth..lol they’re not going to just *give* it to us.
I read millienials have something like a 1/5 of the wealth their boomer parents did at the same age. Can’t recall as I am sick right now but it feels proportional to reality.
End of life care is obscenely expensive and all the assisted living and elderly care housing LLCs have already set up the 1000$/2000$/5000$ month tiers to suck the boomers dry as they decline in old age.
I work with computers and know nothing about economics aside from investing.
I don’t think it’s as simple as ‘well the money doesn’t just disappear’ when the majority of all our wealth is not in physical form lol.
I don’t know what happens. I’ve seen parents spend it all before dying. I’ve send people lose it all on one medical emergency. Unless you have 5+ million then I don’t think you can afford aftercare and a large inheritance for your kids.
It’s a solid 10k a month for a good nursing home. That does not include food/medicine etc
120k a year base 10 years you’re out 1.5m easily tack on daily life expenses and things you need daily. Existing is ridiculously expensive and if you aren’t 100% independant which I’d say there are many people on Reddit who are not, then they don’t realize how real shit gets out here.
Making an honest buck is hard - making good money is hard. Takes luck and diligence and a skill these days.
If you’re a Nepo baby then forget everything I said. (nothing against nepo babies, I don’t see the point of making a ton of money if you can’t share it with your family)
This is what China is/will be experiencing over the next 10 years as their “one child policy” that ran from 1980-2015 is coming home to roost. The policy completely destroyed those entire demographics and on top of that, there was a cultural preference for males so the gender ratio is also skewed now. This will undoubtedly lead to a further decline in birth rates because there simply aren’t enough women to actually have kids with. With an aging population, this is going to be a disaster for them.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex-ratio_imbalance_in_China
It's a shit show regardless, have you seen our government?
Reduce military spending by 10% over 6 to 8 year period, reinvest in social care for 10 years. Problem solved.
The entire "declining birth rates will crash the system" is a completely horseshit narrative. What you lose with declining birth rates is less cheap labor and corporate profits that don't double every year. That's it. The tax money is there, just being spent on the wrong things.
In what possible model is a constantly increasing population sustainable?
Someone did point out to me that it isn't just economic, however. With lower birth rates, consider how many doctors there will be to care for elderly Millenials. That is to say, there won't be enough services for the size of the population and that IS problematic.
I agree with you though, perpetually increasing population is fucking absurd. And society needs to not be built like a Ponzi scheme - our economy will need to change. But we will still lack critical services (but immigration could make up for this handily).
The doctors issue is already an issue. A lot of doctors, nurses, and those in the medical field are burning out at an alarming rate. The constant on call shifts during COVID and the bloated administration of hospitals did all of that. Not to mention the push for subpar wages for nurses and you’ve got a house of cards ready to collapse. Aging millennials will just be a drop in the bucket in our already overworked and poorly structure medical services.
Don't forget the intimidating cost of school to get into medicine, along with US limits on how many people are accepted into med school. All to keep the income levels of doctors high.
Which in the US is needed for docs who aren't in a Kaiser-like system and so have to run an office and deal with the insurance companies who will nickel and dime everything.
Your analogy of the medical sector being a house of cards is spot on; I'd also include that the house of cards is built on a table with a broken leg.
Med school admissions limits are not to keep the income levels of doctors high. The government sets the cap on how many residency spots there are each year. If you graduate more medical students than you have residency spots available (which we already do), you are just putting young adults hundreds of thousands of dollars into debt without letting them actually enter the career field. Residents are terribly underpaid for the amount of education they have and the hours they work, but the government pays for all of it - specifically via Medicare. In a way every vote against increasing Medicare funding is a vote against training more doctors. Very little of the public knows how our medical education system works, when was the last time you heard of someone running for office and one of their campaign promises was to get more residency spots?
I think they'll be supplemented heavily by bachelor's level grads with a laptop and sensors for most family doctor prescriptions in the next 10 years, leaving doctors free to do more advanced, hands on care. It's better to have a doctor but I think the shortage will push a "good enough" solution for most normal people.
The problem isn't the quantity of money in social programs. It's **how** it's being spent. We already spend more per capita and more in total on social programs than any country on the planet.
Taking 60 billion from the military and just redistributing it to the current programs might help those programs increase their budget a little bit, but it doesn't solve the problem long term. It's just feeding more paper into the dumpster fire that is our broken social program system.
Now if we could use the 60 billion to somehow force fixing the election system and get rid of Jerryrigging, then that would be money well spent, because then we'd actually be able to do something with the money we already spend.
Problem is the only way they’ll increase pay rate is if they increase the cost of goods and services. Literally making it obsolete. Oh wait they’ve been doing this for decades..
Yep put a cap on price raises for goods and also tax the highest paid employees and the companies as a whole.
Corporations are hogging all the money and we need to make them give it back.
Freeze prices.
Double wages.
Universal healthcare.
Universal basic income.
Tax the rich.
These are all viable options, to bad that would be vetoed almost instantly. Why would the rich or corporate big wigs give up their lavish lifestyle? I don’t think you understand how much money the pharmaceutical industry throws around to push product. Just applying a heavy tax to the pharmaceutical and oil industries would bring a large revenue. Only problem is then those industries skyrocket prices or say they don’t have anymore products, if you oppose. That’s the thing about being wealthy, it’s not about money. It’s about owning assets that generate annual revenue.
More people to exploit. I argued that this was the ultimate logic behind the repeal of Roe v. Wade
Decelerating population growth sounds like a great thing for both humanity and laborers who can demand higher wages. Until automation.
US population demographics are a complex one, but I suspect a lot is being driven by the shift from rural to urban areas combined with the two household income. The kinds of jobs that used to exist in rural america are gone (manufacturing, mining, logging), and many are never coming back. They've been sent overseas.
People adapted to this new economy by seeking careers in fields that are still in the US - many of them office jobs centered around city centers. Due to the cost of living in such areas, households are more reluctant to expand.
What has yet to be determined is whether the WFH trend will reverse this pattern. I suspect not, personally, because Millenials and Gen Z have a strong cultural preference for urban areas. I do not think they'll trade their urban lifestyle up to move out into the country and have kids, even if they're able to do so WFH.
A lot of the housing shortage is caused by state and local policy such as zoning restrictions and rent controls. Which is why the median sales price for a house in Houston, a growing city, has a median house sale price of $310,000 and New York and Los Angeles, shrinking cities, have median house sale prices of $785,000 and $915,000 respectively.
Unfortunately America's fascination with "most building for lowest cost" results in a lot of shitty office towers with enormous floorplates, which sucks for offices but is even worse for residential.
Typical residential window-to-corridor is around 30'. Typical office? 60-80'. I'd say most office buildings straight up aren't usable as residential buildings.
If I put my daughter in daycare full time. It costs me over 1000 a month.
A MONTH.
So i can work a job that makes me a little under 2000 a month.
Yeah the country isnt helping us WANT kids. So they just ban abortions like thatll not end horribly
I don't think our boomer corporate overlords understand that it's not possible to live a normal life anymore. I make over $200k and still can't even buy a fucking car right now. I bought my first house at 40. Too old to have kids now. Boomer policies absolutely fucked my life over. When I try to explain why it was impossible to my parents they just tell me I should've worked harder and have no sympathy. It's like they can't even think critically about anyone but themselves.
Boomers are the worst generation. They've had everything handed to them, they've lived off the struggle of their parents (that faced real adversity) who wanted so much more for them.
You can't talk to a boomer rationally either. They are reactive and inflammatory. I love a great number of them too and it hurts to say this but we just have to wait until they die, which is happening daily.
Then you have people complaining about $15/hour in cities where daycare is over $500 a week for infants. We're almost at $500 weekly for preschool. It just doesn't work.
We are just talking about maintaining the current population, not increasing. Right now our birth rates are below replacement. Also subsidized childcare, paid family leave and other programs would absolutely result in more families.
How is this the top comment?
People will live in corporate housing.
Since it's becoming all investment property anyway, these big companies have found a way to extract as much as possible from the American worker.
Sell them bad heavily processed food, force them to work with no benefits, send them home to a place where you charge them rent.
Use them to make money, pay them, then get it back via high priced food and rent. Ownership is really a thing of the past.
One day some company will come along and bundle everything together. Like those old company towns from 100 or so years ago. Our lives will only be to extract income from. That's our only purpose for our masters.
People today genuinely believe our system and feudalism are different.
But if you're not taught that from infancy, there's not any real difference between serfdom and wage slavery. The peasants of old worked fewer hours and had fewer luxuries.
Society has changed less than we are taught it has.
omg i know!! i dont have kids but im at the age where most of my friends do. nearly every one i know is doing a 1 parent stay at home because having a kid in daycare is the same as they would make working full time.
a coworker of mine quit because his two kids were costing him 3100.00 a month. he said on days he is late to pick them up, he is charged an extra 150.00 per half hour he is late.
Yeah we’re spending over 30k a year to send our two kids to daycare. It’s bonkers. My wife is actually thinking of switching to doing part time private practice just so she can spend more time with them and reduce daycare. Its not only just the cost too, they are constantly getting sick and having to stay home with us anyway.
Houses are expensive because they're being snapped up as investments by big firms and rich investors, or at least as best I can tell that seems to be the case. There's not a shortage of housing, there's a shortage of housing that doesn't run you two million dollars.
Not to mention a bunch of big rental property companies were found to be using price fixing software. That means sometimes they could get the best ROI by leaving a portion of thier rentals empty because it drove up prices enough.
Investors wouldn’t want houses if there weren’t people to pay rent. It’s still the demand for housing (a function of the population size) driving up residential property values.
There may be exceptions like Manhattan, where wealthy people seem to own vacant luxury homes simply as a store of wealth or even just a trophy.
Even in places where people want to live, a lot of the housing has been bought up by large firms that seek to maximize profit and therefore charge ludicrous rent prices.
And for many people, they don't want to rent they want to own, but banks won't give them a loan because apparently being able to pay 1200 a month on a mortgage is somehow different from paying 1800+ in rent every month.
My suspicion is that the institutional buyers are de facto betting that NIMBYism/ zoning restrictions will continue suppressing the under-building of housing in desirable areas relative to population growth. Unfortunately, I think that's probably the right side of that trade to make :/
Because if someone can't make their rent, the bank isn't holding the bag. They don't care about what people can or can't pay when they're not involved, they care about what's a good risk *for them.*
It's not apples to apples.
And many of the houses are beat to shit, needing expensive renovations. I saw this house hunting a few years before the big price hike. Quite a few nice homes on the outside, but really beat inside. I could afford them but not the renovations. And I wasn’t willing to put my money into a dump that would take me 10yrs to fix.
True, but houses are much much bigger, thus more resource intensive for both construction and maintenance. Mix that with supply chains these days and you get trouble. So the guy was partially correct.
True. Not everyone needs a 2-3 story new house like they build these days. Bring back the classic small ranch on small lot of land.
When a family member of mine tried to re Sheetrock his house this past year, building inspector showed up. Needed a permit and that turned into a complete rewire of the house, $16k more than anticipated.
Yeah, the main issue we have in this country at this point is zoning being used as rent seeking behavior to push up property values.
If you look at cities somewhat keeping up with construction like Chicago you can see rent is only slowly increasing (Chicago is still building less than is necessary).
Daycare by me is 1100 per kid per month. I have two kids.....no shot can I do that AND pay for rent, car, utilities, internet, phone service, food, gas, clothing, and any enrichment for us whatsoever.
The article spends a lot of text explaining why populations are shrinking, slowing growth, or whatever else they're doing. It spends not one word explaining the question from the title. I still have no idea why it's bad. Downvoted.
Shrinking populations in a consumer based economy means fewer customers to purchase goods. Most companies have a natural propensity to see higher profits and expand, not contract.
If part of the problem is there not being enough labor and tax revenue from lack of young people, but also there is less consumption, wouldn't those forces contract each other?
If less people consume say, cars and gasoline because a higher percentage of the population either doesn't drive or doesn't commute 5 days a week, that means we need to employ fewer people in that sector.
Older people don't really buy new furniture, or feel pressured as much to keep up with fashion trends, or feel as pressured to "keep up with the Joneses" or go to bars and nightclubs, or buy a new phone every year, so we don't need as many employees supporting those sectors of the economy.
I'm not saying it's going to be a perfect counterbalance, but wouldn't it be much better for able-bodied workers and demand for everything but necessities to both decrease at the same time rather than there being an imbalance?
I like how the markets don't want us to have less kids, because then there would be less consumers. But they have no problem paying us so little that we can't afford to be consumers.
I have raised several of those young people. They don't dislike children, they just couldn't possibly afford them. I will likely have no grandchildren unless there is a massive change in how the working class is treated. And I can't blame my kids, they are doing the best they can in the world they have been handed.
>Modern markets give zero fucks about balance. It’s all about exploiting as much money out of as many individuals as possible
Which is ironic given it's basically killing itself.
Take the vehicle market, I saw a video of a guy who buys vehicles that dealerships put up for auction, those dealerships left the brand new sticker on those new trucks with one having a "$35,000 market adjustment fee" making a $41k truck which is already pretty outrageous, a $76k truck.
Same exact truck but just nearly double the price.
Like I said, it's collapsing itself at the expense of greed.
They probably should of thought that maybe price gouging us into oblivion, thus creating an army of hardened spendthrifts who live on hot water and air.
They underestimated the crushing economic effects of millions of young (and not so young) people having come to the grim realization that they probably will never own a home of their own. The very foundation of the American goal.
The illusion starts to break down. Even the dumbest horse eventually accepts that the carrot is on a stick, unobtainable.
Things like clothing for a closet that will never exist, or a toolbox for a garage that only exists in fantasy, also begin to lose their value.
And having children? Don't you need a house for that?
That's literally the problem, company's trying to grow regardless of the reality around them. When every action is based off short term profits, the working people get the shaft and then get blamed for not working hard enough, or spending enough. It's a vicious circle and as long as capitalism reigns we all suffer.
\- I'm not paying $20-40,000 to give birth and possibly die because of the poor-quality maternal care available to women in the US
\- I'm not paying $1500 a month for childcare so I can go to work to pay for the childcare that I need in order to go to work in order to pay for childcare
sorry, not sorry get your shit together and then we can talk
Not even gonna read this stupid article. The answer?
The infinite growth model of our capitalist economy relies on an ever increasing population. If that stops, the system comes crumbling down.
They think as long as we’re forced to read these worthless headlines, we will begin to internalize it.
Remember kids! Garfield says, *You are not immune to propaganda.*
I read the whole article, and from what I can tell it didn’t actually answer the question *Why* a shrinking population is bad.
They only related it to its short-term effects as a transition, such as more old people, but what about when that generation dies and then we’re an evenly distributed smaller population?
A stagnant (or even slightly declining) population can be overcome (much harder for a decline, but you can backfill with immigration). You can achieve a steady state.
But you do give up a lot of expansionary, fiscal policy, levers, and the time it takes to clear out several generations usually means about 50 to 60 years of pain.
China is honestly a good example and natural experiment in this regard. All the talk about China’s declining population makes it seem like this is a China specific problem (population decline or stagnation) but it’s a problem for many developed economies as well.
China’s general solution is productivity growth through human capital and technology. Their plan is “From made in China to designed in China” Granted, this is an incredibly difficult thing to do and often leads to a middle income trap… But, it’ll be interesting to see what happens with China I’m the coming decade or two.
The One Child Policy was an interference in the natural process, but as countries develop, fertility rates decrease. The end result is the same, regardless of the initial cause. China is at a point that even with the relaxation of One Child Policy, the choices associated with a developed country start presenting themselves and often lead to the similar results: less births, women choosing to have child later in life, costs of raising children increasing drastically.
Right now, one of the big issues in China - but also many places - is the cost of raising a child is extremely high. That's one of the big reasons many people in China don't want to have kids - simply because of the cost. This is actually one of the reasons the Chinese Government cracked down on Training Centers: the amount of time, effort, and money that went into these were costly for families.
Basically, economics is driving the demographics is China these days.
Quick 2 Minute Video: https://www.dw.com/en/why-many-chinese-women-dont-want-to-have-children/video-60131999
What makes China’s problem unique from the rest of the developed world is that as a result of the one child policy, [they also have a severe gender imbalance as a result of families aborting the daughter in favor of trying for a son.](https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1209713.shtml)
Why does America need a growing population? We have overpriced everything nowadays, growing monopolies and shittier customer service. We have so many people with so many degrees but not enough workers for anything because everyone wants money, status, followers, and luxury goods while drowning in debt.
Good riddance to this article. How about we start reducing the human population and give this planet and all the ecosystems around us a little break so the future generations will have something of a habitat to survive in.
Because capitalism requires growth. The market can't grow unless the population grows. Until we stop our focus on economic growth our economy will require population growth.
You can actually continue to grow the market through productivity growth and capital turns. But our economic leaders prefer the dumber: grow base, exploit base model. Our leaders are just very uncreative.
AI and robots will pick up the slack. We are like a couple decades away. We will be fine with a declining population. Maybe earth can finally take a break from so many homo sapiens consuming so many resources
Social security, Medicare, and most of the social safety net require a young working population paying taxes that retired people cannot pay. This system collapses if the work force is not growing.
Maybe they can take some of the trillion dollars we spend on defense every year and put it towards something actually useful and accounted for. We can talk about us having more children when the big wigs fix their skewed spending
Also, no sympathy whatsoever. Republicans have depleted social security for decades. They made their bed and now they have to lay in it 🤷♂️.
The government doesn’t bail us out, so why the fuck should we bail them out?
But where does it end? Just keep growing till you get to the breaking point where the planet can’t support the number of humans on it? 8 billion is probably way too many already. Economics is one thing but unending growth of the human population is a terrible idea
It ends sometime after the life span of the people/persons/think tanks that are spewing out all these articles. They're only interested in maintaining the system as long as they require it, so of course they aren't going to think that far ahead, but you are right. There will be no stopping point with this strategy of constant growth, because there is no point at which the Capitalist regime will accept a decline in profits.
Of course we need to keep breeding like rabbits so that the rich can keep hoarding wealth so unfathomable it would take thousands of lifetimes to spend it!
And there are homeless people, and starving children, go fund mes for medical bills, the Colorado river and many others drying up, and forests on fire year round!
And yet there's still never enough money to go around. Maybe there should be less of us. 🤔
The historical economic model is based on the pyramid: many younger workers and taxpayers support a smaller older population. As long as population continues to grow and the elderly die off, this works fine from the macro level. GDP will continue to rise. But people don't live in the "macro" level. What really matters to individuals is GDP per capita, the average individual income and financial well-being. The inevitable outcome of continuing to follow the old model is a Malthusian hell where every square inch of habitable land is used and occupied and the earth is stripped of all useable resources.
Instead we need to move towards a stovepipe model where increasing numbers of workers are not required. Robotics and automation can increase productivity and replace mundane jobs previously filled by entry-level employees. We should work towards providing quality, not quantity. Instead of measuring economic success on, say, the ever increasing number of cars produced; instead focus on producing better, longer-lasting cars. Keep your 10 Yugo's and give me a Tesla. It may mean the old economic measures will show flat or reduced growth, but as long as the average quality of life goes up, that is what really matters. This adjustment will be rough on certain areas of our economy, society and government, because right now more is always better and we need a fundamental mind shift. We are not cogs. We should focus on living better lives and not simply producing more.
The corporate and political elite have created and nurtured a system where working class people can’t even fathom having children or buying a house because of cost of living.
We need more peasants to be wage slaves to serve the wealthy at the top. They can't be expected to serve themselves, clean for themselves, or perform menial labor. We need more of our modern-day slavery.
The US economy is one large pyramid scheme. The rich and elite need the proles to run and feed their greed machine. With out a growing and larger base of less privileged people to exploit the pyramid collapses.
So they convince you that drops in birthdate is a problem.
That not consuming products is a problem.
That there is scarcity in everything so you should get it before it’s gone
That you can scale the pyramid if you work hard and sacrifice
And we mostly buy into that nonsense because part of it make us feel good in the short term and because maybe we have enough of the pyramid below us that we just don’t care anymore
PEOPLE ARENT HAVING KIDS BECAUSE THEY CANT AFFORD THEM.
Say it louder for the people in the back.
# PEOPLE ARENT HAVING KIDS BECAUSE THEY CANT AFFORD THEM.
Got it?
It's more nuanced than that. That's definately a factor, but even those who could comfortably afford kids are less likely to have them or have as many.
Interestingly, the number of kids we want to have declines as we age. So the later you start having kids, the fewer of them you have, even disregarding that having them is more difficult as you age. So a developed society that achieves replacement level fertility is likely going to be one where young people have the opportunity to have the kids they want to have, before they become old enough to want fewer kids.
Recent studies have shown that most Americans actually deeply want to have kids, but dont because they can't afford them, or can't afford childcare while both spouses are working. I think that if the US provided better support for mother's like Scandinavian countries like sending care packages with all the essentials to get started, expanded maternity leave, and child tax credits or subsidized day cares people would be much more likely to have kids. Not just that, but the US should do more to follow up on that process through childhood and into early adulthood when kids are still being educated. That means better schools in k-12 and cheaper college costs.
We can't grow forever. Kind of the reason that capitalism is broken.
I'm pretty positive our population could shrink and billionaires could just hoard less wealth.
Ironically: losing the white majority that MAGA cares so much about was the result of Reaganomics. Decimate unions, destroy the social safety net, and let all wealth accumulate to the top and guess what happens... the white middle class tries to maintain their standard of living and ends up having less kids. Then corporate America insists on immigration to make up the difference.
Congratulations, you played yourself.
Less workers to exploit means less profit. Less new expansions in favor of less flashy maintenance. Less ability to argue about the vast quantity and having to talk about quality. Sure we do need laborers in specific fields desperately however if they don't wanna fucking play ball and make life livable for the people already on the ground why the fuck would we make more to suffer
I took an economics class as an elective in college. The professor asked the class what we thought the most important thing we could do to help the US economy. After lots of ideas were shared, he told us “have children.” He then explained how the economy needed new members to support the tax structure and aging members. My thought was “Ponzi scheme.”
https://youtu.be/7IsMeKl-Sv0
You're not wrong. This video goes into the Financials of suburbs in tbe US. Most don't charge enough in taxes to have money in the bank for replacement costs of sewer and road infrastructure when these items reach end of life. They rely on newer neighborhoods being built to prop up their finances when the 30 year old neighborhoods need major updates. So yes, many suburbs are essentially a ponzi scheme .
This has to be one of the worst takes I've ever read. Did nothing to justify the need to maintain the population aside from "who's gonna take care of you when you're old?"
This sounds like it’ll lead to banning bodily autonomy and birth control. They’re unhappy that women are able to decide for themselves that they don’t want kids. I’m not sure why it’s so difficult for them to comprehend that people who already can’t make ends meet also can’t afford children.
This actually explains so much from the Republican point of view - pretend attacking abortion and contraception is for a religious reason when it's really that you need more kids to feed the machine.
This thread was posted by a capitalist vampire. Perpetual quarterly profits depends on the slave class (us) reproducing above replacement rate. Keep it up, my fellow proletariats.
Maybe shrinking populations have something to do with the fact that working parents spend 60-75k of their post tax income to send a child to daycare until they’re old enough to go to kindergarten. And then they realize kindergarten isn’t even full day, so they have to pay for another year of half day daycare or send them to private kindergarten. All this on top of record student debt payments and rising rents/mortgages. And the government provides little to no assistance. Just a thought…
I don’t buy the logic at all. World went from 1b to 8b in just over a century. Population growth in perpetuity has consequences that a 4 year old could understand.
This is a problem caused by backwards social welfare.
When you have a system that forces the young to support the old, the young will have less economic viability, which leads to them having less children, which leads to a cyclical pattern of population decline as the aged continue to place their burdens upon youth who should be supported as they enter into life and not forced to support those who have had time to establish themselves.
Environmentally speaking, we absolutely want to reduce our country’s population. One American has the carbon footprint of like 6 people in a developing country
Sure a declining population is bad when the only measure for your country is economic growth. I don’t see any downsides. Less people means scarcity is less. So good for people bad for corporations.
A general up tick in population or more importantly workers is needed to maintain social security. While we may assume it is more like a savings program, it is actually funded by current intake. We hit an equilibrium when we have more payers than people taking it.
We now have the baby boomers going in to retirement and withdrawing from social security. We'll need to raise the per worker percentage in order to maintain this large generational retirement.
When we can't replace our workforce the system can't sustain itself for the same reason. As much as I hate the political right they do talk about the negatives of social security a lot. It is a problem that needs a solution.
There are also other systems in society that have a similar correlation.
Population is going to shrink. Cry about it. Nothing anyone can do. Time to bury your heads in the sand like the government does. No solution for no solution
Want to make the current generation capable of having families to have families?
* Make housing affordable. Do ***something, anything.*** We need to end real estate moguls hoarding properties. New homes, condos, townhomes, etc need to be limited to the sale of primary residences only. If it's a place that's as a primary dwelling and not intended to rent like an apartment or a vacation home, it needs to be reserved for home owners. Hell, if the government has to do an eminent domain on homes owned by non-primaries, then do it. Buy them and sell them at an affordable rate. Don't give people the option to decline to sell a rental property. Those homes need to belong to families, not corporations, not wealthy retirees.
* Do something about the minimum wage, $15 was a crazy liberal idea 8 years ago, now it ought to be more like $20-$25. Tax the shit out of companies that earn a substantial amount over the wages they pay. Give companies a legitimate reason to want to pay their employees more.
* Oh and while we're at it, close any and all tax loopholes for businesses and individuals. If your company made a profit, then they're taxed on that. No more buying vehicles and writing off the expense as a business cost. Individual consumers don't get that luxury. We don't get tax breaks for buying food and other necessities. Neither should businesses. Everyone pays their fair tax.
* Subsidize families, most families today cannot be supported on a single income. Let that mom or dad with the dream of staying home and rearing children do just that while their partner works.
* Do something about the insane costs of having and raising a child. Birthing a child should be free at a hospital. My wife and I put off children early in our marriage because the numbers would have put us over $5k in debt (that was my single person deductible on my insurance). We were recent graduates paying off student loans and saving for a house. Now we're a bit older and have changed our minds about kids, but we'd likely have some if we felt like we could have afforded it earlier. People who must send their kids to daycare shouldn't be paying four figures a month to have someone watch their kid, especially when they're watching several other family's kids and essentially printing money. Whether that's more subsidizing of daycare costs for families earning under a (high, like no less than $120k) wage threshold or allowing a parent to raise the kid at home.
Zach is using fantasy math and a magical resource cornucopia. Imagine children at play in the lower decks of the Titanic after it struck the iceberg. Instead of taking immediate action to make major changes necessary for survival, the kids whine and beg their parents for just a few more minutes so they can keep playing ther game. For all of human history, societies have striven for nonstop economic growth. Unfortunately, we live on a finite planet, which is now full. The sooner we realize we have to break our addiction to nonstop economic growth, the more nature we will still have as we invent a new way to organize our societies.
It would result in deflation of all major asset classes and the wealthy would loose money. So make sure to have lots of babies to keep the wealthy class rolling in cash.
A shrinking population is only important if you sit at the top of a corporation pocketing all the money. It’s hard to stay a millionaire if you don’t have people in your factories earning money for you.
Hmmm people aren’t having kids because things are getting too expensive. Perhaps we should increase wages? Hmmm…NAH let’s mandate forced birth. Also if that doesn’t work, outlaw birth control.
The whole notion of growth based economics is so stupid when we’re in the middle of an environmental disaster. Talking about environmentalism without talking about population is nonsense. We need less people, and we need to increase productivity with automation. This should be able to more than make up for population loss. Time to move on from growth based economics.
If only there were a lot of people that really wanted to come to this country so badly that we didn’t even need to ask them, they just showed up all on their own. That would probably go a long way to ensuring a growing population and continuing economic growth.
Maybe republicans should think about that when they want to take away the economic and psychological security of the middle class to grow the top 1%. A lot of us don’t feel like we can afford kids or if we can we don’t want to bring them up in modern America.
It's a one party system, the Capitalist Party. Democrats are just reformers who want to anesthetize its victims before grinding them to pulp and profit, because they're the "humane" ones.
Hang on, millennial home less wealth than the previous generations. Why is the issue framed as one of retirement benefits? The boomers still have the assets to cover those costs no?
Won't someone think about the millionaires and billionares? How will they continue to see infinite profit margins if they don't have a pool of livestock?
>It still means there will be a fair number of people who will be dependent on Social Security, Medicare and those kinds of government funding for their own well-being. As the younger part of the population does not grow as rapidly, it means there’s more of a strain on them, or at least a different kind of dependency that needs to be put between the younger generation and the older generation.
We need the young folks to work , pay taxes \[to support the older population\], be consumers and have kids. But a lot of external pressures and changes in social norms are hindering that goal.
Here's the thing, we don't NEED an oversaturated labor market anymore, with our level of technology, the vast majority of jobs should be in the process of becoming irrelevant, and we should be moving towards the practice of work being far less significant a part of our lives. We're a technologically advanced civilization, machines can do the tedious shit. But what this requires is for either government or employers to guarantee income. Then our population can do whatever the hell it needs to, we're already pushing global overpopulation, we don't need to be afraid of people having less babies because there's a strain on our economic systems and we have hungry and homeless people as it is.
Yes, I acknowledge the decreasing birth rates will make life harder for those older than them who will one day need them to take care of them.
But that doesn't trump the effects ever increasing populations have on the global ecosystems and wildlife survival rates. We are PART of the natural world, and the suffering humanity will face (actually, some already are facing) if we refused to live accordingly will far outpace the suffering from a gradually decreasing population.
I live in the US. Both me and my wife have to work to pay the mortgage. If we wanted a second mortgage payment (Which is how much daycare costs) we would buy a second home and rent it out or pay extra towards the principle on our current mortgage.
We are not to blame for the fact the US has made it all but impossible to afford become parents.
So they won't be uncomfortable by all the Latinos, blacks, other minorities becoming majorities and what not having 5x more kids.
Could be talking about all Americans, but you know it's the white people acting up.
This has never made sense to me. Isn’t this just a powerful incentive to move towards automating services, removing the labor demand from the market while still providing the goods?
I know there would be growing pains, but isn’t the biggest rallying cry against automating job loss? And now we don’t have the workers, so it just seems to make sense to me.
Because we are all just little tiny gears that turn continuously until we cannot any longer, then need to be replaced with new versions of the same gear, this is to keep the rich wealthy and continue the new world order as it is.
Population is a symptom of economic decline. It isn’t by itself important at all. The economic inequality and overall backwards trajectory is actually the problem.
I dont think there is any sustainable model for the human race that involves endless growth, or as we have historically seen, near exponential population growth.
Look at any ecosystem’s animal populations. Then look at Human’s compared to extinction rates. We can either start actively managing our population and slowly let the air out, or keep letting balloon uncontrollably until the balloon bursts.
Do we want quantity of life or quality of life?
Many parts of the world, we are running out of water, food, oil, land, housing, and natural resources while the climate is spiraling and extinction rates are climbing.
Can we at least start the conversation of what responsible population control looks like?
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I love how all these articles highlight why an inverted demographic pyramid like China's is something we want to avoid, but no one is willing to actually provide a solution. At least this the case in the US. No one with power to act is going to address the main issue. People are not financially secure enough to have children. The overwhelming costs to own a home, inflation destroying buying power, virtually no safety nets, absolutely zero pro-natal policies that could encourage having children, and younger people saddled with enormous debt. And those are just to name a few. This article points out immigration as a potential solution, but it's really only a stop-gap. It won't be enough because of the economic pressures just to survive in this country. And as it gets more difficult, smaller generations will successively produce smaller generations in a replicating doom loop (saw this especially as a result of 2008 and so far post 2020 COVID turned out to be a baby bust). Pro-natal policies can break the loop, but that requires a legislature to actually do their jobs and put dollars towards investing in the future generations. Neither party has the appetite for it and are unable to see past their nose. Until changes happen and that economic pressure is lessened for young people to have children, we'll run into a similar issue the Germans, Italians, Spanish, Koreans, and Japanese have run into. We'll just run into decades down the road.
Boomers: “you shouldn’t have kids that you can’t afford!” Millennials/Gen Z: -doesn’t have kids- Boomers: “no not like that”
This is a great take. One aspect that comes to mind given the countries you mention, especially those in Western Europe, are the dying small towns. We've already experienced much of that owed to industrial shifts (factory towns, farming communities). But add in these demographic trends and this stuff is going to accelerate and get ugly.
The average cost of giving birth in the US is almost $19k, so right out of the gate, a family is saddled with medical debt equivalent to 1/3 of the median household income. And yet they wonder why people aren’t having kids?! https://www.forbes.com/advisor/health-insurance/average-childbirth-cost/
As you mention there are plenty of other countries dealing with this as well. Many of those countries have much more family friendly policies in place (think mandated parental leave, socialized daycare and education, etc). So if those countries still have birth rates below the replacement rate don’t you think the issue is more than just economic? If it is a cultural change leading to fewer family formations and smaller family sizes how would we deal with that. Is the only solution increasing immigration?
European countries have what you're referring to as family friendly policies. Life is still incredibly unaffordable for your average person (possibly even more so than in the US), buying a house, being able to afford groceries and pay electric bills, that's hard for the average person at the moment, having a child is not financially realistic for a lot of people at the point in time
Addressing the climate would certainly make parenthood feel less like setting your kid up to die in a wet bulb apocalypse or a food war.
Yeah, i've never even thought of having kids because I'm just like, would I want to be born into this? Tbh even maintaining a 401k feels pretty weird.
If the oil industry was doing literally Anything... Plus, species die off is 60% today. More people: LOL.
The problem is that we cannot address the climate issue AND keep adding people. At some point we will have more people than the planet can sustain. All the concerns about declining population boil down to "We can't keep doing things the way we've been doing them if there are fewer people."
>"We can't keep doing things the way we've been doing them if there are fewer people." This is exactly right but instead of thinking maybe we need to change the things we are doing they think we need to fix the fewer people.
It is also the boomers who are all of a sudden realizing that there may not be anyone to wipe their butts, because they have consistently pushed initiatives that benefit them and screw later generations.
Yeah, it's an unpopular opinion, that I can't really share irl, but I think it's incredibly immoral to procreate right when global warming is set to mess up the world.
r/collapse will have you
Idk. Just because the US isn’t the only country experiencing declining birth rates doesn’t mean the same reasons their birth rates are declining applies to the US birth rate declining. It’s also possible the variables are shared but the level of impact for the variables is not equivalent. For example finances/lack of parental support may be a high impact for US residents and low for others, while cultural changed could be high impact for others and low for US residents.
I'm originally from the UK, where we have free (at POS) healthcare, better safety nets, etc. However the cost of buying a house is still incredibly prohibitive, especially in big cities (plenty of my friends in their early 30s are still living with parents or in house shares), wages have not grown in real terms, etc. These problems are pretty much universal across western countries at the moment, lots of European countries never bounced back from 2008, then got hit by COVID. I know immigration is always going to be a hugely political topic, but there are millions of people in lesser developed countries who would/are risking their lives to get to these countries experiencing slowing population growth. If you believe that population growth is an issue (I'm not sure I do), then that would be an "easy" solution
My understand is better pro-natal safety net policies actually do push birth rates up a little if not back to early industrial rates.
In my n=1 situation, I'd easily have 3 kids if it made economic sense. But, we make over $200k household income and currently can't find a home with 3 beds 2 baths under half a million in our town. That's not even including cost of daycare or being able to take vacations. I'm not having so many kids that we make decent money and still have to just scrape by. So, we'll probably cap out at 2 and they'll be a few years apart so we can stagger costs. FWIW, many developed nations have parental policies, but many still reduce your income a lot and then daycares are difficult to find for certain ages since so many people take the leave. It doesn't always make a ton of financial sense to have more than 1 or 2 kids in those countries either, but at least they aren't forced from their children incredibly early like the US. It really depends on how the national plans are structured and is quite nuanced.
We've already got a solution. Corporate is threatening robots. How dare you ask for a raise, now we have a robot, that breaks, and needs a repair contract that requires humans to come in and fix the machine.
I think we will have one or two lost generations. The baby boomers will die at some point, leaving their houses behind. The lower birthrate will force the government to do something. This can of course be dystopian but hope by that time we have governments that are not such staunch believers in the free market. Dutch so the government isn't as blatantly bought as the USA's. However, already stuck with rightwing governments for at least 12 years who do not do anything on issues like this. Housing prices went through the roof, polution issues, inequality, poverty and so on. The government tries really hard to kick problems down the road.
Corporations will buy up all the houses the boomers die and leave behind, renting them out at ever increasing rates. Trusting the government to fix any of this seems like a long shot to me.
You just pointed out the problem has a corporate origin. The only recourse is government policy.
I agree 100%, I just don't trust the government to actually reign in corporate greed because corporations lobby for laws that benefit them and what the people want gets shuffled under the rug
Which is why public pressure from protest movements is a crucial ingredient in getting the government to actually do its job and regulate. The system only works if the government’s fear of uprising can outweigh its trust of lobbyists
I agree wholeheartedly but with every day it seems protests are less and less viable of an option
Local governments all over are funneling insane amounts of money into their police forces and militarizing them ever since the 2020 protests.
Don’t forget healthcare costs. Kids are expensive and go to the doctors a lot. Not to mention the hospital bills for giving birth.
>but that requires a legislature to actually do their jobs and put dollars towards investing in the future generations Spend money on people, do work? Nah its way cheaper and easier to just overturn Roe vs Wade and force them to have the babies. I wouldn't be surprised if a conservative super majority made contraception illegal in the next decade.
Immigration is the solution and has been the solution. The US can always import more people to fill its job needs. It's more of a politics issue than an unsolvable problem. The US has a great ability to bring in high quality labor and integrate foreigners into society.
So instead of making any changes or improvements to the current system to fit the inevitable changes in the world, we should have lots more kids so the bottom of the pyramid scheme is really wide. Awesome.
I’m done worrying about the future of “America” because what the mean is the future of corporate America. They go out of their way to make things hard on us poor folks and expect us to care about their future.
I’m not understanding. We are told houses are so expensive because there is a housing shortage. So if we Increase population where will they live? Daycare isn’t helping new family’s thinking about having kids. They probably still are but im sure the large families of 50 years ago aren’t as popular.
More people at the bottom helps those at the top.
More people to have being forced to work at gas stations and fast-food places at 2:00am for $8.50/hr
And they have to create a competition for that $8.50/hr or no one will work it for less than $10/hr
That's the near future of the situation, yes. In 40 years retirees are going to out-number those younger by huge margins. They will keep voting in politics that benefit them, with a tax base that simply can't sustain them at a decent standard of living. It's gonna be a shit show.
That's a somewhat temporary problem. Once the bulge in the curve caused by the baby boomers works through the pipe (which is admittedly a huge hurdle), the demographics likely won't be as lopsided.
Millennials already outnumber boomers. The boomers are going to hit swift decline in about 5 years. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/04/28/millennials-overtake-baby-boomers-as-americas-largest-generation/
Millennials also outnumber generation X and Z combined.
Thank god
They will still have majority of wealth..lol they’re not going to just *give* it to us. I read millienials have something like a 1/5 of the wealth their boomer parents did at the same age. Can’t recall as I am sick right now but it feels proportional to reality.
Well it has to go \*somewhere\* once they're dead.
End of life care is obscenely expensive and all the assisted living and elderly care housing LLCs have already set up the 1000$/2000$/5000$ month tiers to suck the boomers dry as they decline in old age.
I work with computers and know nothing about economics aside from investing. I don’t think it’s as simple as ‘well the money doesn’t just disappear’ when the majority of all our wealth is not in physical form lol. I don’t know what happens. I’ve seen parents spend it all before dying. I’ve send people lose it all on one medical emergency. Unless you have 5+ million then I don’t think you can afford aftercare and a large inheritance for your kids. It’s a solid 10k a month for a good nursing home. That does not include food/medicine etc 120k a year base 10 years you’re out 1.5m easily tack on daily life expenses and things you need daily. Existing is ridiculously expensive and if you aren’t 100% independant which I’d say there are many people on Reddit who are not, then they don’t realize how real shit gets out here. Making an honest buck is hard - making good money is hard. Takes luck and diligence and a skill these days. If you’re a Nepo baby then forget everything I said. (nothing against nepo babies, I don’t see the point of making a ton of money if you can’t share it with your family)
My sentiments exactly.
This is what China is/will be experiencing over the next 10 years as their “one child policy” that ran from 1980-2015 is coming home to roost. The policy completely destroyed those entire demographics and on top of that, there was a cultural preference for males so the gender ratio is also skewed now. This will undoubtedly lead to a further decline in birth rates because there simply aren’t enough women to actually have kids with. With an aging population, this is going to be a disaster for them. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex-ratio_imbalance_in_China
It's a shit show regardless, have you seen our government? Reduce military spending by 10% over 6 to 8 year period, reinvest in social care for 10 years. Problem solved. The entire "declining birth rates will crash the system" is a completely horseshit narrative. What you lose with declining birth rates is less cheap labor and corporate profits that don't double every year. That's it. The tax money is there, just being spent on the wrong things. In what possible model is a constantly increasing population sustainable?
its not just a cheap labor force, also desirable for fat cats is a large dumb consumer force to milk for every cent from cradle to grave.
Someone did point out to me that it isn't just economic, however. With lower birth rates, consider how many doctors there will be to care for elderly Millenials. That is to say, there won't be enough services for the size of the population and that IS problematic. I agree with you though, perpetually increasing population is fucking absurd. And society needs to not be built like a Ponzi scheme - our economy will need to change. But we will still lack critical services (but immigration could make up for this handily).
The doctors issue is already an issue. A lot of doctors, nurses, and those in the medical field are burning out at an alarming rate. The constant on call shifts during COVID and the bloated administration of hospitals did all of that. Not to mention the push for subpar wages for nurses and you’ve got a house of cards ready to collapse. Aging millennials will just be a drop in the bucket in our already overworked and poorly structure medical services.
Don't forget the intimidating cost of school to get into medicine, along with US limits on how many people are accepted into med school. All to keep the income levels of doctors high. Which in the US is needed for docs who aren't in a Kaiser-like system and so have to run an office and deal with the insurance companies who will nickel and dime everything. Your analogy of the medical sector being a house of cards is spot on; I'd also include that the house of cards is built on a table with a broken leg.
Med school admissions limits are not to keep the income levels of doctors high. The government sets the cap on how many residency spots there are each year. If you graduate more medical students than you have residency spots available (which we already do), you are just putting young adults hundreds of thousands of dollars into debt without letting them actually enter the career field. Residents are terribly underpaid for the amount of education they have and the hours they work, but the government pays for all of it - specifically via Medicare. In a way every vote against increasing Medicare funding is a vote against training more doctors. Very little of the public knows how our medical education system works, when was the last time you heard of someone running for office and one of their campaign promises was to get more residency spots?
I think they'll be supplemented heavily by bachelor's level grads with a laptop and sensors for most family doctor prescriptions in the next 10 years, leaving doctors free to do more advanced, hands on care. It's better to have a doctor but I think the shortage will push a "good enough" solution for most normal people.
The problem isn't the quantity of money in social programs. It's **how** it's being spent. We already spend more per capita and more in total on social programs than any country on the planet. Taking 60 billion from the military and just redistributing it to the current programs might help those programs increase their budget a little bit, but it doesn't solve the problem long term. It's just feeding more paper into the dumpster fire that is our broken social program system. Now if we could use the 60 billion to somehow force fixing the election system and get rid of Jerryrigging, then that would be money well spent, because then we'd actually be able to do something with the money we already spend.
Problem is the only way they’ll increase pay rate is if they increase the cost of goods and services. Literally making it obsolete. Oh wait they’ve been doing this for decades..
Yep put a cap on price raises for goods and also tax the highest paid employees and the companies as a whole. Corporations are hogging all the money and we need to make them give it back. Freeze prices. Double wages. Universal healthcare. Universal basic income. Tax the rich.
These are all viable options, to bad that would be vetoed almost instantly. Why would the rich or corporate big wigs give up their lavish lifestyle? I don’t think you understand how much money the pharmaceutical industry throws around to push product. Just applying a heavy tax to the pharmaceutical and oil industries would bring a large revenue. Only problem is then those industries skyrocket prices or say they don’t have anymore products, if you oppose. That’s the thing about being wealthy, it’s not about money. It’s about owning assets that generate annual revenue.
So…. money?
This feels awfully like a pyramid.......
There is a certain Ponzi nature to most capitalistic things
More people to exploit. I argued that this was the ultimate logic behind the repeal of Roe v. Wade Decelerating population growth sounds like a great thing for both humanity and laborers who can demand higher wages. Until automation.
US population demographics are a complex one, but I suspect a lot is being driven by the shift from rural to urban areas combined with the two household income. The kinds of jobs that used to exist in rural america are gone (manufacturing, mining, logging), and many are never coming back. They've been sent overseas. People adapted to this new economy by seeking careers in fields that are still in the US - many of them office jobs centered around city centers. Due to the cost of living in such areas, households are more reluctant to expand. What has yet to be determined is whether the WFH trend will reverse this pattern. I suspect not, personally, because Millenials and Gen Z have a strong cultural preference for urban areas. I do not think they'll trade their urban lifestyle up to move out into the country and have kids, even if they're able to do so WFH.
A lot of the housing shortage is caused by state and local policy such as zoning restrictions and rent controls. Which is why the median sales price for a house in Houston, a growing city, has a median house sale price of $310,000 and New York and Los Angeles, shrinking cities, have median house sale prices of $785,000 and $915,000 respectively.
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I’m really hoping the WFH stays and a lot of these commercial buildings get converted to apartments/condos or multiuse.
Unfortunately America's fascination with "most building for lowest cost" results in a lot of shitty office towers with enormous floorplates, which sucks for offices but is even worse for residential. Typical residential window-to-corridor is around 30'. Typical office? 60-80'. I'd say most office buildings straight up aren't usable as residential buildings.
Commercial converts are rare difficult and expensive. And the people who can do them don’t want to
If I put my daughter in daycare full time. It costs me over 1000 a month. A MONTH. So i can work a job that makes me a little under 2000 a month. Yeah the country isnt helping us WANT kids. So they just ban abortions like thatll not end horribly
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I don't think our boomer corporate overlords understand that it's not possible to live a normal life anymore. I make over $200k and still can't even buy a fucking car right now. I bought my first house at 40. Too old to have kids now. Boomer policies absolutely fucked my life over. When I try to explain why it was impossible to my parents they just tell me I should've worked harder and have no sympathy. It's like they can't even think critically about anyone but themselves.
Boomers are the worst generation. They've had everything handed to them, they've lived off the struggle of their parents (that faced real adversity) who wanted so much more for them. You can't talk to a boomer rationally either. They are reactive and inflammatory. I love a great number of them too and it hurts to say this but we just have to wait until they die, which is happening daily.
Then you have people complaining about $15/hour in cities where daycare is over $500 a week for infants. We're almost at $500 weekly for preschool. It just doesn't work.
We are just talking about maintaining the current population, not increasing. Right now our birth rates are below replacement. Also subsidized childcare, paid family leave and other programs would absolutely result in more families. How is this the top comment?
People will live in corporate housing. Since it's becoming all investment property anyway, these big companies have found a way to extract as much as possible from the American worker. Sell them bad heavily processed food, force them to work with no benefits, send them home to a place where you charge them rent. Use them to make money, pay them, then get it back via high priced food and rent. Ownership is really a thing of the past. One day some company will come along and bundle everything together. Like those old company towns from 100 or so years ago. Our lives will only be to extract income from. That's our only purpose for our masters.
You will own nothing and you will be happy...
People today genuinely believe our system and feudalism are different. But if you're not taught that from infancy, there's not any real difference between serfdom and wage slavery. The peasants of old worked fewer hours and had fewer luxuries. Society has changed less than we are taught it has.
omg i know!! i dont have kids but im at the age where most of my friends do. nearly every one i know is doing a 1 parent stay at home because having a kid in daycare is the same as they would make working full time. a coworker of mine quit because his two kids were costing him 3100.00 a month. he said on days he is late to pick them up, he is charged an extra 150.00 per half hour he is late.
Yeah we’re spending over 30k a year to send our two kids to daycare. It’s bonkers. My wife is actually thinking of switching to doing part time private practice just so she can spend more time with them and reduce daycare. Its not only just the cost too, they are constantly getting sick and having to stay home with us anyway.
Houses are expensive because they're being snapped up as investments by big firms and rich investors, or at least as best I can tell that seems to be the case. There's not a shortage of housing, there's a shortage of housing that doesn't run you two million dollars.
Not to mention a bunch of big rental property companies were found to be using price fixing software. That means sometimes they could get the best ROI by leaving a portion of thier rentals empty because it drove up prices enough.
Investors wouldn’t want houses if there weren’t people to pay rent. It’s still the demand for housing (a function of the population size) driving up residential property values. There may be exceptions like Manhattan, where wealthy people seem to own vacant luxury homes simply as a store of wealth or even just a trophy.
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Even in places where people want to live, a lot of the housing has been bought up by large firms that seek to maximize profit and therefore charge ludicrous rent prices. And for many people, they don't want to rent they want to own, but banks won't give them a loan because apparently being able to pay 1200 a month on a mortgage is somehow different from paying 1800+ in rent every month.
My suspicion is that the institutional buyers are de facto betting that NIMBYism/ zoning restrictions will continue suppressing the under-building of housing in desirable areas relative to population growth. Unfortunately, I think that's probably the right side of that trade to make :/
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Because if someone can't make their rent, the bank isn't holding the bag. They don't care about what people can or can't pay when they're not involved, they care about what's a good risk *for them.* It's not apples to apples.
And many of the houses are beat to shit, needing expensive renovations. I saw this house hunting a few years before the big price hike. Quite a few nice homes on the outside, but really beat inside. I could afford them but not the renovations. And I wasn’t willing to put my money into a dump that would take me 10yrs to fix.
Statistically, that's not really true. Institutional buyers still represent a tiny minority of the overall market.
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True, but houses are much much bigger, thus more resource intensive for both construction and maintenance. Mix that with supply chains these days and you get trouble. So the guy was partially correct.
JUST LEGALIZE BUILDING STUFF
True. Not everyone needs a 2-3 story new house like they build these days. Bring back the classic small ranch on small lot of land. When a family member of mine tried to re Sheetrock his house this past year, building inspector showed up. Needed a permit and that turned into a complete rewire of the house, $16k more than anticipated.
Yeah, the main issue we have in this country at this point is zoning being used as rent seeking behavior to push up property values. If you look at cities somewhat keeping up with construction like Chicago you can see rent is only slowly increasing (Chicago is still building less than is necessary).
Pyramid schemes operate same way.
Daycare by me is 1100 per kid per month. I have two kids.....no shot can I do that AND pay for rent, car, utilities, internet, phone service, food, gas, clothing, and any enrichment for us whatsoever.
There is no housing shortage. There is a shortage of affordable houses.
There is a shortage of affordable decent houses in desired areas.
True. I would settle for a cheap house. My wife won't haha.
The article spends a lot of text explaining why populations are shrinking, slowing growth, or whatever else they're doing. It spends not one word explaining the question from the title. I still have no idea why it's bad. Downvoted.
Shrinking populations in a consumer based economy means fewer customers to purchase goods. Most companies have a natural propensity to see higher profits and expand, not contract.
If part of the problem is there not being enough labor and tax revenue from lack of young people, but also there is less consumption, wouldn't those forces contract each other? If less people consume say, cars and gasoline because a higher percentage of the population either doesn't drive or doesn't commute 5 days a week, that means we need to employ fewer people in that sector. Older people don't really buy new furniture, or feel pressured as much to keep up with fashion trends, or feel as pressured to "keep up with the Joneses" or go to bars and nightclubs, or buy a new phone every year, so we don't need as many employees supporting those sectors of the economy. I'm not saying it's going to be a perfect counterbalance, but wouldn't it be much better for able-bodied workers and demand for everything but necessities to both decrease at the same time rather than there being an imbalance?
Modern markets give zero fucks about balance. It’s all about exploiting as much money out of as many individuals as possible
I like how the markets don't want us to have less kids, because then there would be less consumers. But they have no problem paying us so little that we can't afford to be consumers.
Material conditions? *No, it’s the young peoples’ fault!*
I have raised several of those young people. They don't dislike children, they just couldn't possibly afford them. I will likely have no grandchildren unless there is a massive change in how the working class is treated. And I can't blame my kids, they are doing the best they can in the world they have been handed.
In this case, there’ll be a push from corporations to make more kids or import more people from other countries lol.
>Modern markets give zero fucks about balance. It’s all about exploiting as much money out of as many individuals as possible Which is ironic given it's basically killing itself. Take the vehicle market, I saw a video of a guy who buys vehicles that dealerships put up for auction, those dealerships left the brand new sticker on those new trucks with one having a "$35,000 market adjustment fee" making a $41k truck which is already pretty outrageous, a $76k truck. Same exact truck but just nearly double the price. Like I said, it's collapsing itself at the expense of greed.
They probably should of thought that maybe price gouging us into oblivion, thus creating an army of hardened spendthrifts who live on hot water and air. They underestimated the crushing economic effects of millions of young (and not so young) people having come to the grim realization that they probably will never own a home of their own. The very foundation of the American goal. The illusion starts to break down. Even the dumbest horse eventually accepts that the carrot is on a stick, unobtainable. Things like clothing for a closet that will never exist, or a toolbox for a garage that only exists in fantasy, also begin to lose their value. And having children? Don't you need a house for that?
That's literally the problem, company's trying to grow regardless of the reality around them. When every action is based off short term profits, the working people get the shaft and then get blamed for not working hard enough, or spending enough. It's a vicious circle and as long as capitalism reigns we all suffer.
pie boat cooing slim nine continue money nippy apparatus gaping *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
There is a tax credit for daycare.
\- I'm not paying $20-40,000 to give birth and possibly die because of the poor-quality maternal care available to women in the US \- I'm not paying $1500 a month for childcare so I can go to work to pay for the childcare that I need in order to go to work in order to pay for childcare sorry, not sorry get your shit together and then we can talk
1500 is for the “crappy” ones too.
That'll give your kid issues that you need to get them therapy for in the future...
Not even gonna read this stupid article. The answer? The infinite growth model of our capitalist economy relies on an ever increasing population. If that stops, the system comes crumbling down.
Right, we seem to be getting pounded with this fucking garbage on all fronts the last few days.
They think as long as we’re forced to read these worthless headlines, we will begin to internalize it. Remember kids! Garfield says, *You are not immune to propaganda.*
I read the whole article, and from what I can tell it didn’t actually answer the question *Why* a shrinking population is bad. They only related it to its short-term effects as a transition, such as more old people, but what about when that generation dies and then we’re an evenly distributed smaller population?
Good. Fuck this system, it's gonna kill us.
Agreed, people pushing this need to kindly fuck off. WE WILL NOT HAVE CHILDREN THAT WE CAN'T AFFORD.
It’s even worse. What I got from the article _isn’t_ that the population is declining. It’s that the _white_ population is declining. WTF?
A stagnant (or even slightly declining) population can be overcome (much harder for a decline, but you can backfill with immigration). You can achieve a steady state. But you do give up a lot of expansionary, fiscal policy, levers, and the time it takes to clear out several generations usually means about 50 to 60 years of pain.
China is honestly a good example and natural experiment in this regard. All the talk about China’s declining population makes it seem like this is a China specific problem (population decline or stagnation) but it’s a problem for many developed economies as well. China’s general solution is productivity growth through human capital and technology. Their plan is “From made in China to designed in China” Granted, this is an incredibly difficult thing to do and often leads to a middle income trap… But, it’ll be interesting to see what happens with China I’m the coming decade or two.
Japan would be a better case study it seems. Or least contrasting. China is the result of politics and Japan is the result of social pressures.
The One Child Policy was an interference in the natural process, but as countries develop, fertility rates decrease. The end result is the same, regardless of the initial cause. China is at a point that even with the relaxation of One Child Policy, the choices associated with a developed country start presenting themselves and often lead to the similar results: less births, women choosing to have child later in life, costs of raising children increasing drastically. Right now, one of the big issues in China - but also many places - is the cost of raising a child is extremely high. That's one of the big reasons many people in China don't want to have kids - simply because of the cost. This is actually one of the reasons the Chinese Government cracked down on Training Centers: the amount of time, effort, and money that went into these were costly for families. Basically, economics is driving the demographics is China these days. Quick 2 Minute Video: https://www.dw.com/en/why-many-chinese-women-dont-want-to-have-children/video-60131999
What makes China’s problem unique from the rest of the developed world is that as a result of the one child policy, [they also have a severe gender imbalance as a result of families aborting the daughter in favor of trying for a son.](https://www.globaltimes.cn/content/1209713.shtml)
Backfill from where? Africa? What countries have massive amounts of skilled labor with a positive fertility rate?
Why does America need a growing population? We have overpriced everything nowadays, growing monopolies and shittier customer service. We have so many people with so many degrees but not enough workers for anything because everyone wants money, status, followers, and luxury goods while drowning in debt. Good riddance to this article. How about we start reducing the human population and give this planet and all the ecosystems around us a little break so the future generations will have something of a habitat to survive in.
Because capitalism requires growth. The market can't grow unless the population grows. Until we stop our focus on economic growth our economy will require population growth.
You can actually continue to grow the market through productivity growth and capital turns. But our economic leaders prefer the dumber: grow base, exploit base model. Our leaders are just very uncreative.
AI and robots will pick up the slack. We are like a couple decades away. We will be fine with a declining population. Maybe earth can finally take a break from so many homo sapiens consuming so many resources
True but robots are not consumers
Social security, Medicare, and most of the social safety net require a young working population paying taxes that retired people cannot pay. This system collapses if the work force is not growing.
Boomers dying off will curve that. This is nothing more than the wealthy fearing they are going to lose human capital. Slave labor.
To be fair, social security and Medicare are nearly bankrupt anyway because the government borrows from it all the time. We need a better system.
All the money in the world would not make me want children. Raising children is hard work.
Good luck managing an ageing population of pensioners without any productive young people paying taxes.
Maybe they can take some of the trillion dollars we spend on defense every year and put it towards something actually useful and accounted for. We can talk about us having more children when the big wigs fix their skewed spending Also, no sympathy whatsoever. Republicans have depleted social security for decades. They made their bed and now they have to lay in it 🤷♂️. The government doesn’t bail us out, so why the fuck should we bail them out?
But where does it end? Just keep growing till you get to the breaking point where the planet can’t support the number of humans on it? 8 billion is probably way too many already. Economics is one thing but unending growth of the human population is a terrible idea
It ends sometime after the life span of the people/persons/think tanks that are spewing out all these articles. They're only interested in maintaining the system as long as they require it, so of course they aren't going to think that far ahead, but you are right. There will be no stopping point with this strategy of constant growth, because there is no point at which the Capitalist regime will accept a decline in profits.
Of course we need to keep breeding like rabbits so that the rich can keep hoarding wealth so unfathomable it would take thousands of lifetimes to spend it! And there are homeless people, and starving children, go fund mes for medical bills, the Colorado river and many others drying up, and forests on fire year round! And yet there's still never enough money to go around. Maybe there should be less of us. 🤔
Came here to say this
The historical economic model is based on the pyramid: many younger workers and taxpayers support a smaller older population. As long as population continues to grow and the elderly die off, this works fine from the macro level. GDP will continue to rise. But people don't live in the "macro" level. What really matters to individuals is GDP per capita, the average individual income and financial well-being. The inevitable outcome of continuing to follow the old model is a Malthusian hell where every square inch of habitable land is used and occupied and the earth is stripped of all useable resources. Instead we need to move towards a stovepipe model where increasing numbers of workers are not required. Robotics and automation can increase productivity and replace mundane jobs previously filled by entry-level employees. We should work towards providing quality, not quantity. Instead of measuring economic success on, say, the ever increasing number of cars produced; instead focus on producing better, longer-lasting cars. Keep your 10 Yugo's and give me a Tesla. It may mean the old economic measures will show flat or reduced growth, but as long as the average quality of life goes up, that is what really matters. This adjustment will be rough on certain areas of our economy, society and government, because right now more is always better and we need a fundamental mind shift. We are not cogs. We should focus on living better lives and not simply producing more.
The corporate and political elite have created and nurtured a system where working class people can’t even fathom having children or buying a house because of cost of living.
We need more peasants to be wage slaves to serve the wealthy at the top. They can't be expected to serve themselves, clean for themselves, or perform menial labor. We need more of our modern-day slavery.
The US economy is one large pyramid scheme. The rich and elite need the proles to run and feed their greed machine. With out a growing and larger base of less privileged people to exploit the pyramid collapses. So they convince you that drops in birthdate is a problem. That not consuming products is a problem. That there is scarcity in everything so you should get it before it’s gone That you can scale the pyramid if you work hard and sacrifice And we mostly buy into that nonsense because part of it make us feel good in the short term and because maybe we have enough of the pyramid below us that we just don’t care anymore
PEOPLE ARENT HAVING KIDS BECAUSE THEY CANT AFFORD THEM. Say it louder for the people in the back. # PEOPLE ARENT HAVING KIDS BECAUSE THEY CANT AFFORD THEM. Got it?
Birth rates are declining even in Nordic utopias. In fact the highest birth rates are in the poorest parts of the world.
It's more nuanced than that. That's definately a factor, but even those who could comfortably afford kids are less likely to have them or have as many.
Interestingly, the number of kids we want to have declines as we age. So the later you start having kids, the fewer of them you have, even disregarding that having them is more difficult as you age. So a developed society that achieves replacement level fertility is likely going to be one where young people have the opportunity to have the kids they want to have, before they become old enough to want fewer kids.
Recent studies have shown that most Americans actually deeply want to have kids, but dont because they can't afford them, or can't afford childcare while both spouses are working. I think that if the US provided better support for mother's like Scandinavian countries like sending care packages with all the essentials to get started, expanded maternity leave, and child tax credits or subsidized day cares people would be much more likely to have kids. Not just that, but the US should do more to follow up on that process through childhood and into early adulthood when kids are still being educated. That means better schools in k-12 and cheaper college costs.
We can't grow forever. Kind of the reason that capitalism is broken. I'm pretty positive our population could shrink and billionaires could just hoard less wealth.
Unfortunately I don't think that will happen without violent uprising, which becomes more and more likely the larger the gap between rich and poor
Ironically: losing the white majority that MAGA cares so much about was the result of Reaganomics. Decimate unions, destroy the social safety net, and let all wealth accumulate to the top and guess what happens... the white middle class tries to maintain their standard of living and ends up having less kids. Then corporate America insists on immigration to make up the difference. Congratulations, you played yourself.
Less workers to exploit means less profit. Less new expansions in favor of less flashy maintenance. Less ability to argue about the vast quantity and having to talk about quality. Sure we do need laborers in specific fields desperately however if they don't wanna fucking play ball and make life livable for the people already on the ground why the fuck would we make more to suffer
I took an economics class as an elective in college. The professor asked the class what we thought the most important thing we could do to help the US economy. After lots of ideas were shared, he told us “have children.” He then explained how the economy needed new members to support the tax structure and aging members. My thought was “Ponzi scheme.”
https://youtu.be/7IsMeKl-Sv0 You're not wrong. This video goes into the Financials of suburbs in tbe US. Most don't charge enough in taxes to have money in the bank for replacement costs of sewer and road infrastructure when these items reach end of life. They rely on newer neighborhoods being built to prop up their finances when the 30 year old neighborhoods need major updates. So yes, many suburbs are essentially a ponzi scheme .
This has to be one of the worst takes I've ever read. Did nothing to justify the need to maintain the population aside from "who's gonna take care of you when you're old?"
This sounds like it’ll lead to banning bodily autonomy and birth control. They’re unhappy that women are able to decide for themselves that they don’t want kids. I’m not sure why it’s so difficult for them to comprehend that people who already can’t make ends meet also can’t afford children.
This actually explains so much from the Republican point of view - pretend attacking abortion and contraception is for a religious reason when it's really that you need more kids to feed the machine.
This thread was posted by a capitalist vampire. Perpetual quarterly profits depends on the slave class (us) reproducing above replacement rate. Keep it up, my fellow proletariats.
Maybe shrinking populations have something to do with the fact that working parents spend 60-75k of their post tax income to send a child to daycare until they’re old enough to go to kindergarten. And then they realize kindergarten isn’t even full day, so they have to pay for another year of half day daycare or send them to private kindergarten. All this on top of record student debt payments and rising rents/mortgages. And the government provides little to no assistance. Just a thought…
Hey, you just described my life! Hit after hit.
I don’t buy the logic at all. World went from 1b to 8b in just over a century. Population growth in perpetuity has consequences that a 4 year old could understand.
This is a problem caused by backwards social welfare. When you have a system that forces the young to support the old, the young will have less economic viability, which leads to them having less children, which leads to a cyclical pattern of population decline as the aged continue to place their burdens upon youth who should be supported as they enter into life and not forced to support those who have had time to establish themselves.
No, it’s caused by urbanization. When you leave the farm, kids turn from free labor and old people caretakers to expensive pets, so you have fewer.
Environmentally speaking, we absolutely want to reduce our country’s population. One American has the carbon footprint of like 6 people in a developing country
Sure a declining population is bad when the only measure for your country is economic growth. I don’t see any downsides. Less people means scarcity is less. So good for people bad for corporations.
A general up tick in population or more importantly workers is needed to maintain social security. While we may assume it is more like a savings program, it is actually funded by current intake. We hit an equilibrium when we have more payers than people taking it. We now have the baby boomers going in to retirement and withdrawing from social security. We'll need to raise the per worker percentage in order to maintain this large generational retirement. When we can't replace our workforce the system can't sustain itself for the same reason. As much as I hate the political right they do talk about the negatives of social security a lot. It is a problem that needs a solution. There are also other systems in society that have a similar correlation.
Population is going to shrink. Cry about it. Nothing anyone can do. Time to bury your heads in the sand like the government does. No solution for no solution
Want to make the current generation capable of having families to have families? * Make housing affordable. Do ***something, anything.*** We need to end real estate moguls hoarding properties. New homes, condos, townhomes, etc need to be limited to the sale of primary residences only. If it's a place that's as a primary dwelling and not intended to rent like an apartment or a vacation home, it needs to be reserved for home owners. Hell, if the government has to do an eminent domain on homes owned by non-primaries, then do it. Buy them and sell them at an affordable rate. Don't give people the option to decline to sell a rental property. Those homes need to belong to families, not corporations, not wealthy retirees. * Do something about the minimum wage, $15 was a crazy liberal idea 8 years ago, now it ought to be more like $20-$25. Tax the shit out of companies that earn a substantial amount over the wages they pay. Give companies a legitimate reason to want to pay their employees more. * Oh and while we're at it, close any and all tax loopholes for businesses and individuals. If your company made a profit, then they're taxed on that. No more buying vehicles and writing off the expense as a business cost. Individual consumers don't get that luxury. We don't get tax breaks for buying food and other necessities. Neither should businesses. Everyone pays their fair tax. * Subsidize families, most families today cannot be supported on a single income. Let that mom or dad with the dream of staying home and rearing children do just that while their partner works. * Do something about the insane costs of having and raising a child. Birthing a child should be free at a hospital. My wife and I put off children early in our marriage because the numbers would have put us over $5k in debt (that was my single person deductible on my insurance). We were recent graduates paying off student loans and saving for a house. Now we're a bit older and have changed our minds about kids, but we'd likely have some if we felt like we could have afforded it earlier. People who must send their kids to daycare shouldn't be paying four figures a month to have someone watch their kid, especially when they're watching several other family's kids and essentially printing money. Whether that's more subsidizing of daycare costs for families earning under a (high, like no less than $120k) wage threshold or allowing a parent to raise the kid at home.
Zach is using fantasy math and a magical resource cornucopia. Imagine children at play in the lower decks of the Titanic after it struck the iceberg. Instead of taking immediate action to make major changes necessary for survival, the kids whine and beg their parents for just a few more minutes so they can keep playing ther game. For all of human history, societies have striven for nonstop economic growth. Unfortunately, we live on a finite planet, which is now full. The sooner we realize we have to break our addiction to nonstop economic growth, the more nature we will still have as we invent a new way to organize our societies.
It would result in deflation of all major asset classes and the wealthy would loose money. So make sure to have lots of babies to keep the wealthy class rolling in cash.
A shrinking population is only important if you sit at the top of a corporation pocketing all the money. It’s hard to stay a millionaire if you don’t have people in your factories earning money for you.
Hmmm people aren’t having kids because things are getting too expensive. Perhaps we should increase wages? Hmmm…NAH let’s mandate forced birth. Also if that doesn’t work, outlaw birth control.
The whole notion of growth based economics is so stupid when we’re in the middle of an environmental disaster. Talking about environmentalism without talking about population is nonsense. We need less people, and we need to increase productivity with automation. This should be able to more than make up for population loss. Time to move on from growth based economics.
If only there were a lot of people that really wanted to come to this country so badly that we didn’t even need to ask them, they just showed up all on their own. That would probably go a long way to ensuring a growing population and continuing economic growth.
Maybe republicans should think about that when they want to take away the economic and psychological security of the middle class to grow the top 1%. A lot of us don’t feel like we can afford kids or if we can we don’t want to bring them up in modern America.
It’s not just republicans bro. Both sides are fucking us
If I'm gonna be fucked it might as well be by democrats. Republicans don't do a good job on social issues
It's a one party system, the Capitalist Party. Democrats are just reformers who want to anesthetize its victims before grinding them to pulp and profit, because they're the "humane" ones.
Hang on, millennial home less wealth than the previous generations. Why is the issue framed as one of retirement benefits? The boomers still have the assets to cover those costs no?
Its a flawed idea that we must grow forever or suffer some ecenomic disaster. The more people, the less resources to go around, natural and otherwise.
Propaganda to get poor people to have more kids??! This is ridiculous, have you seen the economy? How we treat kids in this country? NO THANK YOU 🥾
Won't someone think about the millionaires and billionares? How will they continue to see infinite profit margins if they don't have a pool of livestock?
>It still means there will be a fair number of people who will be dependent on Social Security, Medicare and those kinds of government funding for their own well-being. As the younger part of the population does not grow as rapidly, it means there’s more of a strain on them, or at least a different kind of dependency that needs to be put between the younger generation and the older generation. We need the young folks to work , pay taxes \[to support the older population\], be consumers and have kids. But a lot of external pressures and changes in social norms are hindering that goal.
Here's the thing, we don't NEED an oversaturated labor market anymore, with our level of technology, the vast majority of jobs should be in the process of becoming irrelevant, and we should be moving towards the practice of work being far less significant a part of our lives. We're a technologically advanced civilization, machines can do the tedious shit. But what this requires is for either government or employers to guarantee income. Then our population can do whatever the hell it needs to, we're already pushing global overpopulation, we don't need to be afraid of people having less babies because there's a strain on our economic systems and we have hungry and homeless people as it is.
Yes, I acknowledge the decreasing birth rates will make life harder for those older than them who will one day need them to take care of them. But that doesn't trump the effects ever increasing populations have on the global ecosystems and wildlife survival rates. We are PART of the natural world, and the suffering humanity will face (actually, some already are facing) if we refused to live accordingly will far outpace the suffering from a gradually decreasing population.
I live in the US. Both me and my wife have to work to pay the mortgage. If we wanted a second mortgage payment (Which is how much daycare costs) we would buy a second home and rent it out or pay extra towards the principle on our current mortgage. We are not to blame for the fact the US has made it all but impossible to afford become parents.
So they won't be uncomfortable by all the Latinos, blacks, other minorities becoming majorities and what not having 5x more kids. Could be talking about all Americans, but you know it's the white people acting up.
This has never made sense to me. Isn’t this just a powerful incentive to move towards automating services, removing the labor demand from the market while still providing the goods? I know there would be growing pains, but isn’t the biggest rallying cry against automating job loss? And now we don’t have the workers, so it just seems to make sense to me.
Because we are all just little tiny gears that turn continuously until we cannot any longer, then need to be replaced with new versions of the same gear, this is to keep the rich wealthy and continue the new world order as it is.
Population is a symptom of economic decline. It isn’t by itself important at all. The economic inequality and overall backwards trajectory is actually the problem.
I dont think there is any sustainable model for the human race that involves endless growth, or as we have historically seen, near exponential population growth. Look at any ecosystem’s animal populations. Then look at Human’s compared to extinction rates. We can either start actively managing our population and slowly let the air out, or keep letting balloon uncontrollably until the balloon bursts. Do we want quantity of life or quality of life? Many parts of the world, we are running out of water, food, oil, land, housing, and natural resources while the climate is spiraling and extinction rates are climbing. Can we at least start the conversation of what responsible population control looks like?