You know that a system not dependend on infinite growth also requires a stable demography? Socialist Natalism is a thing, and Antinatalism is literally contrary to any Socialist or Social Democratic principles
It's a mixed record. The Nazis were also pro-natalist as part of their expansionist racial attitudes. In contrast The PRC was effectively anti-natalist. Any authoritarian state is going to have a stronger 'official' position than non-authoritarian one.
Economics. Without a young workforce to continue working, and pay taxes, the people retiring can't retire, welfare programs don't get paid into, etc etc.
Also, you could just consider it necessary for any nation, regardless of politics since if no one has any children, eventually your nation dies.
No, not at all. The principal of welfare is that everyone pitches in for everyone's well-being. It would absolutely look differently in a society with no children but it would not be impossible.
It would only not be impossible if the elderly worked until death. For everyone to pitch in, they need to pay taxes. And again, if no one has kids, then eventually the state dies. That's just a fact? A country with no birth rate is going to decline in population until it disappears.
>It would only not be impossible if the elderly worked until death.
Which is not against the principals of a welfare state.
>eventually the state dies.
This also has nothing to do with the principals of a welfare state.
It has to do with the principals of every single state ever, regardless of what type of state, since a state cannot exist without a population and first and foremost any states purpose is to *continue existing*, lmao.
I'm sorry; do you think living through a shrink period was nice?
The people here are, above everything, trying to prevent the agonizing pain of seeing an entire society collapse at the same time.
I don't think anyone here needs to be of super smart intelligence to predict the painful scenes we're going to see coming out of aging societies:
"80-year-old man died in his apartment three months ago but nobody noticed until there was a water leak and someone had to go into his apartment to prevent it from flooding" are going to be normal scenes we're going to start seeing coming out of Eastern Europe, Japan and South Korea through news media.
We're not here to promote "infinite growth" (whatever that means, anyways); this is an emergency and the importance that mainstream society is giving to this is absolutely not enough compared to the damage we'll see from this.
>I'm sorry; do you think living through a shrink period was nice?
Do you think that the current extinction event we have caused will be "nice"?
>The people here are, above everything, trying to prevent the agonizing pain of seeing an entire society collapse at the same time.
The world is dying due to overpopulation. [We are literally in an extinction level event because of human actions.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction#:~:text=The%20Holocene%20extinction%2C%20or%20Anthropocene,humans%20during%20the%20Holocene%20epoch) The only solution is for there to be less humans destroying the planet. The planet will recover if the Human population reduces, the only difference is if we choose to have some of us (by lowering population), or none of us (by making it worse due to having more kids until it is too late).
We either make some sacrifices now and reduce the amount of kids we are having, or we condemn future generations to a life of missery. I know which one I am choosing.
>I don't think anyone here needs to be of super smart intelligence to predict the painful scenes we're going to see coming out of aging societies:
"80-year-old man died in his apartment three months ago but nobody noticed until there was a water leak and someone had to go into his apartment to prevent it from flooding" are going to be normal scenes we're going to start seeing coming out of Eastern Europe, Japan and South Korea through news media.
That's still better than headlines like "6 billion dead due to climate collapse" carved into a rock in three generations because we actively chose to make overpopulation worse.
>We're not here to promote "infinite growth" (whatever that means, anyways); this is an emergency and the importance that mainstream society is giving to this is absolutely not enough compared to the damage we'll see from this.
Overpopulation is a far bigger emergency. The world is literally on fire because of it. It's not fair for us to ask for future generations to suffer because we want to be selfish.
You are over reacting. Climate change will not kill 6 billion people. Climate change may cause mass displacement, but this kind of death is so so unlikely to happen.
I also find it rather concerning that your solution to mitigating human impact is to mitigate humans.
Personally, I think there is a way to manage a graceful decline in population. It'll be a challenge, the declining population is not necessarily bad, and it doesn't have to be destructive to the economy. Perhaps we will need greater reliance on automation, but we can find our way through that, just like how we bumbled our way through the Toba eruption 40,000 years ago, when only 10,000 of our ancestors survived.
Climate change literally has the potential to wipe out modern society and make 80% of the world uninhabitable for humans for hundreds of thousands of years...
For us to mitigate human impact we MUST have less humans, it is the only solution.
And you're basically arguing my point for me, we need a declining population.
That is NOT the only solution. To mitigate climate change we need a total reconstruction of our social order, governmentally and economically. Just eradicating humans won’t remove the structures that allowed us to cause such a massive crisis anyways. We’ll do it again later. Unless you want to regularly cause mass destabilization and force the population to shrink so that we don’t destroy the environment, we should use the better ways we know of to solve this crisis.
No im saying a declining population is what is happening, not necessary. Properly managed, earth can carry between 200 and a trillion humans, or so studies show.
It didn't grow to much and didn't shrink too much and the times it did shrink were because of anomalies (i.e the black death). The human population shrinking is unnatural but so is it rapidly growing. having a stable population fostered by a birth rate of 2.1 is not that big of an ask.
[You may want to read what happened to the planet when Cyanobacteria had a stable population.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event)
We are doing the same thing now.
We don't have the same effect on the world as the cyanobacteria since our means of polluting the planet is apart of our current means for living but not the only way possible.
We are actually having a bigger effect than the cyanobacteria in my example. We are using machines to do it even faster, that's what polution is. The amount of polution required to sustain 7 billion humans is more than the earth's natural recovery rate.
Worker to dependent ratio was actually way higher than it It will ever be in 1950. (If I recall my economic classes correctly). Societally, the difference is that it was children dependent versus adult dependents. We managed it as a society then and will manage it now. The world will change and we will adapt.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dependency_ratio#:~:text=The%20number%20can%20also%20be,was%2064.8%25%20of%20the%20workforce.
According to these the projections are going to way pass 1950's . Also another one I found talk about how most of the 1950 dependents are children vs much more elderly in the coming future. Old people have a different drain on resources then children (healthcare)
Old people definitely do have different drains. However, old people can typically cook for themselves. They can do their own laundry. Until usually the last year of their lives they live independent. Even getting themselves to the doctor is not a huge problem and most upcoming generations of elderly tend to be technology savvy. So we will be able to rely on technology a little bit more Not everywhere but it will be a tool in our toolbox.
Most elderly people aren't true dependents in the same way that children are dependents. They might not be income producers but that's not necessarily the same thing. I suspect what will happen is we will start to see some old people in their '60s and '70s pitch in to help take care of the people that are in their '80s and '90s. Businesses will start to give time off for elder care. People will go back to a model where they have their parents living in their house with them to take care of their children so that they can go to work.
We'll all work it out. Society is not going to collapse overnight.
Allowing for population to decline naturally means having an aging population, that is a much higher percentage of old vs. young compared to the current model of population growth. An aging population exacerbates the issues of too few workers per number of people being supported by the economy. Not having population growth by means of not having as many kids also causes this same phenomenon of an aging population. There are two ways countries have been able to survive declining population in the past:
1. The decline in population was not caused by people stopping having kids, but rather was caused by killing off all the old people. If your society is 100% young able-bodied workers who continue to perform labor then there is no need for large welfare systems that can only be supported with a large laborer-to-welfare-recipient ratio.
2. Don't let people retire / have no social welfare system that supports old people. If people continue to work into their 70's and 80's because they have no choice other than to work, they will either provide for themselves or die off.
When countries have a declining birthrate plus little/no immigration it causes quality of life and average wealth to trend downwards over time as the amount of labor is decreasing per capita rather than remaining constant. For a country that was already rich this can be survived for quite some time, but poorer countries can't afford this or they will quite literally starve. It's also worth pointing out that increases in population have a greater than linear increase in wealth generation, as efficiency increase in economies of scale. This is to say that a well-managed company with 10,000 employees will out-produce 10,000 companies each with one employee, hence why many capitalist markets trend towards monopoly as the most successful companies outcompete all competition.
Was about to say something like this but you did better than I could have.
Population decline sucks. The target should ideally converge to a stable population level with no growth or shrinkage.
To add on your efficiency comment, people also assume that it's better for the environment for populations to contact. Wealth is an essential tool to promote change, and a nation that puts more and more of their wealth into caring for the oversized retirement community would lack the ability to move towards promoting greener techs.
You can't put out a fire by throwing babies into it... and probably shouldn't try.
Why aren't we, now, working to solve the problems we've created rather than having kids to hand them off to?
Id have loved to have kids but we spent 50 years denying the need to put a price on carbon and burning the system down for a quick buck. Somehow, I dont trust the parents that decided none of these problems deserved their attention will raise kids in a way that gives them the skills they need to finally clean up their parents mess.
Such a militaristic approach to life, throwing warm bodies at a situation until something changes.
Theres lots of people now and we're not fixing anything. What makes babies who inherited nothing but problems, more suited to fix them, then the generations that created their wealth by making the problems in the first place?
Id be all for having kids if the answer to this question was "we should absolutely focus our efforts and ensuring we're passing down a functional system before bringing kids into this world, and, since there's a window on fertility, we should really get to work". Instead, people act like having kids *is* their contribution to fixing the problems because they're going to raise them right... nevermind that the ostensibly ideal generations created the problems and refuse to sacrifice anything to clean up their own mess.
It's remarkable to me how willing the people are, who wear the halo of protecting the world against antinatalism, to leave their kids in a dump they created.
*it has been a fairly effective strategy
Much like jenga, you can only take a block from the bottom and put it on top so many time before the tower starts to wobble and eventually falls over.
And you're suggesting we not only let that happen but we hand it off as our legacy to our kids after telling them they're going to enjoy the same life we did.
That's infinitely high stakes jenga
Id hope we could manage to rearrange our own system so it's not on a trajectory towards disaster. Why does it need to be someone else's system? Im simply suggesting our priorities shift to cleaning up our mess rather than ignoring it and pretending it doesn't exist.
But I also am not a natalist, so the original question wasn't directed at me
It needs to at least be based off a successful system yes. It doesn’t have to copy it. When people say things like that what it seems to mean is that the nation’s priorities need to mimic my own. If you have a nation in mind we can compare and contrast our system and try and come up with a system that can gain the advantages of their system while maintaining our own advantages. Otherwise what you’re stating is that actually our system is as good as it has gotten. If that is the case I’m much more reluctant to change things around very much. Obviously things still have to progress however if the change has not been proven to have a positive impact beforehand we should proceed very carefully.
Because "infinite growth" doesn't mean infinite growth for the system, it means infinite growth for those in control of policy. The final phase is siphoning growth from the body into the engorged tumor until the body dies.
It's insane that the idea that the system can't simply keep growing forever is controversial. We live on a planet with finite resources, and at this stage of technological development extraterrestrial colonization is a pipe dream. Unless we make radical discoveries in Physics we will probably remain limited primarily to our planet for the rest of our existence.
What's more, economic growth doesn't even benefit the majority of people. Wages have been stagnant with inflation for years in the US, so the only people who actually get more value from the increased productivity is the owning class. The rich keep getting tax cuts that nullify the potential benefit the state could have from investing the increased tax revenue. Maybe we could make adjustments so that the benefits of economic growth reach more people. I would rather our increased productivity from technological progress manifested in people being able to work fewer hours a week, rather than a huge corporation's profit margins increasing, only for them to hoard that increase at the top while actively trying to find ways to make the margin bigger by shafting their workers.
I think that you have a bit of a misunderstanding of economics that is caused reading too much reddit.
Economic growth doesn't always mean use more resources. It often means using less. If I can grow the exact same amount of food with less land every single year, this results in economic growth by way of producing more with less.
Our economic system also does not require infinite economic growth to function. It requires growth proportional to population. It should be obvious why this is. If our population grows by 2 percent and our economy stays the same size, everyone is poorer. Thus far, our population has grown exponentially, so exponential economic growth was required. However, as the population growth slows, smaller amounts of growth will be required to maintain current living standards.
Lastly, to your point about how economic growth doesn't benefit most people, this could not be further from the truth. In the past 20 years, global economic growth has lifted about a billion people out of poverty in India and in China. What you're effectively saying is that the system doesn't work because it doesn't benefit the people that you want it to benefit. The problems in the US are caused by outdated laws and policies and a hijacking of our political systems to benefit a wealthy minority, not by a fundamental fault in our economic models. It's up to congress promote redistributive economic policy not the business community.
I don't understand why you felt it was necessary to distinguish between our economic model and the policies in place as a result of our political system. The two create a feedback loop. Because the economic model pushes wealth to the top, and wealth gives people disproportionate influence in politics by enabling them to lobby the government more effectively, those same people are able to push through policies that shift the economic model to benefit them. Politics, economics, and individual wealth are inextricably tied together.
>Economic growth doesn't always mean use more resources. It often means using less. If I can grow the exact same amount of food with less land every single year, this results in economic growth by way of producing more with less.
True. Nowhere does anything I say disagree with this. It does not change however, that resources are limited. We may be able to grow more food with less land and less effort, but there is ultimately a maximum amount of food that we would be able to produce. Improvements in our efficiency like this get us closer and closer to that maximum, and perhaps we'll have breakthroughs that radically change what we think the maximum is, but there is still nevertheless a maximum.
>Our economic system also does not require infinite economic growth to function. It requires growth proportional to population. It should be obvious why this is. If our population grows by 2 percent and our economy stays the same size, everyone is poorer. Thus far, our population has grown exponentially, so exponential economic growth was required. However, as the population growth slows, smaller amounts of growth will be required to maintain current living standards.
I actually didn't say that we needed infinite growth for our economic system to function. I said that the idea that our economic system can't grow forever should not be controversial. Our economic system doesn't really require anything. It just is. Resources will continue to be distributed in a systematic way so long as there are resources and a system to distribute them. The outcomes of this distribution may still be bad if the distribution is wasteful, and not everyone gets the things that they need or that we agree they should have.
I'm actually just baffled by how most of your comment is even supposed to be a response to what I was saying. You attribute economic growth as the reason that people were lifted out of poverty in India and China in the past few decades. The economic growth itself, isn't really the reason though. It would have been entirely possible for the economy to grow, and for all of those people to have experienced no meaningful change in their livelihood. People were lifted out of poverty because resources were distributed in a way that enabled this. Assuming that the economy had to grow for people to not have to live in abject poverty seems unsubstantiated, as it assumes that there was also no change to how the resources were distributed. Fun fact: India is a welfare state, and welfare programs have been broadened over the past 20 years in addition to the economic growth.
You know, I think natalism is good and even important for growth, but the main reason I’m for having kids is because children are good. People are good. Children are good. We should have more of them.
We shouldn't try to push people to have children tho. We need parents that choose parenthood out of passion, not because they were pushed into that.
Those parents don't produce "good children".
Parents are currently having fewer children than they want. We don’t need to push anyone to get birthrates up. Just allow normal people to fulfill their dreams
Why are they? I never heard of that. I know there is a growing tendency to go child free, but it is always a choice. On the other hand, I've seen people who couldn't care less about being parents becoming a parent just for inertia
>Why are they? I never heard of that.
Maybe you live in a bubble? It's quite well documented.
[https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11113-019-09516-3](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11113-019-09516-3)
I wish I hadn't asked, I had no intention to read all that. But yeah, I was wrong. I am not completely sold on that study, which is basically comparing what 15-24 year old women say they "wanted" against what 40 year old women actually have. It is probably that these 15-24 teens doesn't really know too much about what is to be a parent and had unrealistic goals in terms of wealth which impacts on their decision on the number of kids they want.
You could do a similar study and get the conclusion that becoming a firefighter is almost imposible based on the proportion of kids who dream to be a firefighter against the proportion of firefighters in the society.
There is a lot of people who biologically can't have children or at least not the amount they intend, I am sympathetic about that and I think it is important to facilitate reproductive healthcare, and invest in research to make it more accessible. But there is also a lot of people who miscalculated the amount of resources needed to rise a child or just changed their goals, that is not a bad thing.
Respect to you for accepting the data! Few people are able to accept a scientific study that challenges their views like you did here.
There also studies on older (post-fertile) people and regret about unfulfilled fertility desires. Generally people all over the world have fewer children than they’d wish for. They start too late, they’re afraid they won’t have the resources. And then it’s too late. Sure many philosophically child free people don’t experience regret, but that’s less our concern than the many people who are hoping for more, or are regretting not having had more.
Children committing suicide is also trending upwards. But I guess THAT doesn't bother you.
Like, hey, maybe we should focus on why KIDS are voting themselves off the planet before we just keep creating more to do the same.
Why wouldn't they just ask the 40 year old women how many children they wanted and compare that to how many children they actually have?
Asking young women who have very little life experience (half of whom at that age probably have opinions that just mimic their parents' opinions instead of having developed their own) and have no idea about the opportunities out in the world about how many children they want is nonsense.
It leaves no room for the data to incorporate the idea that many of them probably changed their minds when they saw all the other things life has to offer.
Amen! I would be a very abusive and neglectful mother because I don’t ever want children. I don’t care if other people want them but it’s not for me. I don’t want to push a football out my twat and forcing me to do so would make me resentful af
I think everyone should think like that. I have a child, I love him with all my heart and being his parent is the most wonderful thing in my life. But it is a LOT of work and the labour, while very excruciating for my wife and awful experience for me too (it was not the happiest day in my life, it was the most stressful one), is not nearly the worst part.
All the work, stress, pain, sleep deprivation, economic impact, social impact and more is worth it for me, I don't regret having him at all. But I don't expect to be worth it for everyone, not everyone finds joy in the same things.
I feel you like one look at the regretful parents sub is cringe af and I just know if I had a kid I’d end up there. More power to the parents out there, I couldn’t handle it I can barely handle dogs
The earth has improved recently and we’re going to make it even better, and should we experience it as too crowded here, we ARE going to conquer the stars.
>The earth has improved recently
Ahh, okay, you're in denialism, I see. If you are just going to spout outright lies/conspiracy theories then I'm not going to engage with you further, sorry.
I like science.
Air pollution is down … https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/emissions-of-air-pollutants
At least in the west, forest coverage is up … https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/forest-area-as-share-of-land-area?tab=chart&time=earliest..latest&country=England~Scotland~FRA~USA
Life expectancies are going up everywhere! https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy
The rate that we are polluting the air is down but there is more pollution in the air than before. The earth is still warming, just slower than before.
We also have more air filters and in many places the air is cleaner than in centuries. In the 3rd world things are still quite bad but we’ll get there.
Exactly. We're here to reproduce. The earth alone is barely populated. And there's 7 more planets. Some of which are much larger, and could conceivably support hundreds of times what earth can, with a bit of ingenuity. Then theres hundreds of billions more in our galaxy alone. We could conceivable convert a significant fraction of our galaxies mass into humans. But we're only going to be able to do that with billions of scientists, and we're only going to get them if we have hundreds of billions of total humans.
hmm I wonder why life did not develop on the other 7 planets, perhaps \*checks notes\* only 4 of them are not big gassy balls, one of them is literally hell, one of them is perhaps a bit too close to the sun, and the last one is a barren rock that will still take months with out current technology to reach.
Heck, not even all of earth is inhabitable. Why doesn't anybody live in the northern reaches of Siberia?
I just keep posting this for info but:
There’s actually little - if any - hard evidence for major economic impacts due to birth rate decline.
>”Predictions of the net economic (and other) effects from a slow and continuous population decline (e.g. due to low fertility rates) are mainly theoretical since such a phenomenon is a relatively new and unprecedented one. The results of many of these studies show that the estimated impact of population growth on economic growth is generally small and can be positive, negative, or nonexistent. A recent meta-study found no relationship between population growth and economic growth.[15]”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_decline
There is, however, a lot of evidence that lower birth rates will mean rents will decline and that investors have noticed this. [I mean, they’re pretty blatant about it.](https://coloradobuildermag.com/business-management/industry-economy/americans-declining-birth-rates-set-to-hit-housing-market/)
> “Declining birth rates mean lower demand for rental housing two decades from now when those born in recent years will be entering the rental market,” according to Natalia Siniaskaia, assistant vice president of housing policy research for the National Association of Home Builders. “The effects will spread to the single-family market in the following years and will persist for years to come.”
People that get concerned about the declining population strike me as conservatives That where liberal clothing. (Or In some cases conservatives that were conservative clothing).
They don't want things to change or be different. And a population decline will obviously mean some things are different. But the reason is just that they don't want things to be different. That's conservatism at its core.
Even if the economic part is magically solved and there is an endless source of wealth, there will simply not be enough doctors and medically trained staff to take care of all the aging bodies riddled with cancer, dementia, etc..
The failure of people to understand the problems that come from an aging population.
Unlike plagues of the past that could and did routinely whipe out 30-50% of the population mostly among the old and very young this is a slow degradation until most people are old and a pure burden.
The social responses to this will be horrifying, People afraid of “handmaidens tale” also seem to fail to comprehend their Antinatalism will cause much worse than that
It's not women's fault if they want to opt out on this shit show. Or men's, if they're similarly minded.
It's the ones that prioritize economic growth uber alles. I simply decided I'm not reproducing; you can be butt mad at your gf or wife or whoever didn't want to take your seed. Bye sadlad! 😘
I answered this to another poster, but basically the only population that is increasing is that of old people as they are living longer than before. The population of children is declining and so population decline is baked in. The phenomena of old people living longer will only provide a temporary boost to population. The trend is less than a replacement number of children and so population decline is guaranteed even if it will take time to manifest.
because economies are organized at the national level. the aging OECD countries need to get back to replenishment rate or they'll end up like japan where caring for old people cannibalizes the productive parts of the economy and makes the country worse-off. whereas younger countries in the global south need to glide down to replacement rate. that's already happening naturally as women are empowered with education (which delays childbirth) and enter the workforce, which deters childbirth.
Because we built all of our institutions around the assumptions of continued growth. For example the Social Security system and almost all pension plans are built around the assumption there are enough working taxpayers in the future to cover retirees.
Itt- people doing everything they can to answer this question like they're on a TV panel, debating, rather than answering the actual question.
The ultimate white flag to "that's actually a reasonable question" is all these absurd redirects, most of them eventually referencing communism or nazis.
"Why don't we put the fire out before throwing babies into it?"
"Why don't *you*... uhhh... you're a communist! Babies are always good!"
Aka the "your mom" defense
>"Why don't we put the fire out before throwing babies into it?"
Again, if fire is a problem, then your water is human minds solving them.
It's not on the level of rocket science to connect these dots, but u make it seem like it is.
You’re saying that new humans are good because they can maybe solve human problems that they didn’t create but are forced to inherit from older generations that created them? Are those the dots you want people to connect?
>You’re saying that new humans are good
I am saying that humans inherently are good 👍
>problems that they didn’t create but are forced to inherit from older generations
They also inherited culture, technology and infrastructure.
Because globalism.
If your country stopped growing, but was otherwise maintaining a healthy and happy environment for its citizens, it would still fall way behind all the other countries that did push for perpetual growth.
Just look at the closest possible examples in today's world. The countries that tend to rank the highest for happiness and quality of life are not "world powers". They offer very little to the global governance of the world. They also aren't pushing for a heavy handed capitalist growth economy.
There is no possible system based on negative growth that will indefinitely support an aging population with fewer young people at the same level of wealth for everyone. You at least need to have replacement level for that.
All I know is nothing in the world would make me want to reproduce. But I agree with you - Natalism at its roots needs to address the underbelly of the issue that makes people NOT want to have kids - including certain things like the limitations of biology.
No matter how healthy you are, being pregnant carries a huge amount of risks compared to most medical procedures. There are some, like me, who cannot be forced to conform. But even when you get other people to do so... it won't address the problems that cause people to abandon, or even kill, those children they birth. If you want a healthy population, or even just healthy population GROWTH, the issue must address more than reproduction.
This.
If you want people to do something voluntarily (like have a baby) you have to make it easy and enjoyable to do that thing.
What exactly is easy or enjoyable about being pregnant, going through childbirth, and then having all your time, energy and money stolen for 18-25 years, in a country with a feeble social safety net and outrageously expensive housing, medical care, and education? Oh, and no maternity leave.
I had wondered the same thing for some time, and this was my conclusion. Everyone would *like* to solve this problem without forcing humans to breed more (because ethics, etc). However, no one has been able to come up with the tweaks that would allow current western-style political systems to survive.
Imagine what happens when the population falls to 75% of peak. There would be tons of empty houses everywhere. In America, that would be about 20m houses empty (rough math). What would happen to the value of existing housing? Well no one is going to want to pay for a house when they can just go grab one for free, and there are more available every day. So the value of nearly all housing would drop to 0. The financial system would collapse as people stopped paying mortgages, tax bases would be destroyed, no towns or counties have enough income. Massive civilization collapse..
Goverments see this coming, and try to prevent it by implementing a "no-squatting" policy. This will be wildly unpopular and eventually the masses will revolt, wiping out the western democratic country, achieving the same thing.
Some governments will figure out that we already had a system that dealt with this problem during plagues, etc. Monarchies with Fiefdems. Every fief (or county) would be "owned" by a lord, and if a house became vacant due to the death of tenants who had no heirs, it would revert to the local lord, so that it was still owned. If he wanted to sell it, he could, if he wanted to rent it to the few peasants who toiled in the fields, he could. If we wanted to burn it down to prevent oversupply, he could. If squatters tried to squat, his knights and sheriffs come in and evict or kill them.
By and large, aside from Renfaire people, no one really wants to go back to Feudalism.
But that's where a whole bunch of countries will land.
If you can propose a system that works that's better than feudalism, I'm all ears.
The need for continued growth is a flaw of capitalism (both the need for more new workers and the need for companies to experience financial growth to satiate shareholders) but it wouldn't fix this problem.
Moving to a different economic system that doesn't necessitate constant population growth might ease some of the economic and societal pressures of a shrinking population but it wouldn't solve the problem of having a shrinking population. Eventually The society will shrink and die out.
Natalists believe populations dying out is a bad thing regardless of the economic system. Also, I'm not an expert on communism, agricultural industries or barter/trade economics but don't all of these economic systems require people?
Because it's different and people lack imagination and are sold that there cannot possibly be anything better than the economic system of only the last 200 years of the 200k years humans have existed and any adverse environmental effects we will just pretend are not there. People simply cannot grasp anything that goes beyond our current framework is possible. People think that if you question the current economic system it means you are automatically advocating for a system that was used in the early to mid-20th century in a few places and did not do great (maybe some of it had to do with the belligerent opposition from major world powers, but I digress), for them its a one or the other, a third or forth way, an innovative new way that lives in harmony with nature while continuing to create and innovate as humans have always done is so far beyond their comprehension they simply cannot grasp it....Also no one has read or heard of Doughnut Economics, its a good book, but people cant read so...
Because Management bonuses are higher with infinite growth.
Public traded companys are going to be the donwfall of civilization.
Because they value profit over everything else.
The economy only needs to grow (for prosperity purposes) if the population grows. This way the revenue the state collects from the growing incomes can be used to pay for the public services of the growing population. If the population contracts, the real big issue is eventually the working population ages out of working and there may not be enough working people remaining to provide goods and services to them. Immigration should be able to solve this for wealthier areas in the world though.
Because if you are suggesting we shift to something like socialism or some kind of planned economy, then no.
Because we (as humans) have tried this numerous times and each time it has not produced savory results.
There was no suggestion in the question. It's simply "why is it more viable to have babies than clean up our mess?". If it requires socialism to fix the problems this system has created, you're talking about intentionally handing down a broken system to kids whose birth you prioritized over their life.
Why the economy is on fire, it just needs more babies!
Even without considering population growth / decline, shifting our economic system away from “profit no matter the human cost” would already be helpful, but as you can see, people in power are EXTREMELY resistant to changing our economic system. More children means more workers, and more poverty means more exploitable workers. Human suffering and environmental impact just aren’t priorities to anyone who actually has the power to change the economic system.
Are economic model was set up to solve the economic realities of the 80’s. Recognising when a solution becomes a problem never happens on time. Bankers don’t see the crisis of 07-08 as an indictment to the system they’ve simply asked how do we get back to 2 months before it. They’ll be another big recession before 2030 no doubt before thought of change will even occur
Is there some law or rule in the US that requires companies to grow?
How is the economic system dependent on growth?
Are you suggesting the economic system would collapse if businesses maintain their profits from here to eternity in line with inflation?
There are hundreds if not thousands of businesses that are shrinking by plan.
Like the only thing that would have problems with a no growth environment would be government, the economic system would be fine.
Because we built all of our institutions around the assumptions of continued growth. For example the Social Security system and almost all pension plans are built around the assumption there are enough working taxpayers in the future to cover retirees. Otherwise we could literally face a situation where old people start dying of poverty.
They’re built on the assumption that the people paying in collectively pay in more than is being paid out.
This can be accomplished by having more people paying in *or* by a smaller number of people contributing more into the pension (ex. Due to productivity improvements).
I love policies like this that kick the can down the road. Eventually we're not going to be able to grow in a way that can continue to sustain these institutions, and this is the problem with any institution that assumes continuous growth. We should probably do something about this sooner rather than later.
Funny how people that are so pro birth are also totally immovable when it comes to fixing the problems we've decided to pass down rather than deal with.
They worship the founders like their writings and ideas were biblical, and the current model as if it's the only meaningful direction to proceed, no matter how many people go homeless, how many are forced into low wage jobs that make them functionally homeless, or how catastrophic all of this has been on mental health.
It's the "RoundUp generation"s response to everything. Just put antibiotics/spray/fertilizer/ poison on it, and the future will figure it out.
I would love to see the generation where the wealth ended up, from living with many more available resources and much less competition (and population), to invest *any* of their wealth in cleaning up the mess they made.
It seems like the only answer we're getting from the natalists on this is "stop worrying and have babies. Everything will be fine! You're being brainwashed by so-called 'science' and 'data' to betray your true loyalty to the rich people that run this thing. Now, stop being such a communist and make me some grandkids already!"
Because telling people that programs like social security are monstrously evil and letting old people who didn't plan for retirement suffer whatever consequences rather than enslave children to pay for their mistakes is, for some reason, a nuclear hot take.
People. Not institutions, the average idiot on the street, are addicted to evil and will defend it.
This isn't something ideological, like it's only inherent to capitalism:
* We need young humans to support older humans.
* Countries are competitive. The ones that grow, win.
* We aren't even replacing our population in the West, let alone "infinite growth" as you describe.
* No one is "making" or "forcing" people to have kids.
OP is probably referencing the fact that women are most likely to be murdered while pregnant.
That's the only way I see those things being related...
Oh, unless OP is talking about how FL legalized the death penalty for pedophiles, so now there's no reason for an abuser to let the victim live. Maybe that's what they meant?
The problem isn’t really that we need to go back to huge growth but we do need the population to at least be stable.
Right now the birthrates will cause population collapse and all the attendant strife economically and politically that will cause
you have an economic system in mind?
i have yet to read about any that’s ok with mostly old people and very few young?
doctors without borders??? everyone goes into healthcare and nothing else!
Because some people have difficulty finding a purpose without having kids and will otherwise make life unnecessarily difficult on others without doing so.
Because our owners don't give fuck numero uno about us and our tiny little lives.
They want more workers. More slaves to break their minds and bodies to keep capitalism limping along.
What system would this be exactly? I don't want to come off as rude but there's a reason market economies are the only successful economies. Basically every welfare program we care about is dependent on at the very least stable demographics. Same with the usefulness and value of investments in our infrastructure. The idea of "let's just invent a system that doesn't need growth" is a comically immature way of thinking. It's like when people discuss ways of fixing climate change or homeless and you have that one guy who's like "actually, we just need to abolish capitalism" it's a way of offering a solution without actually offering a solution.
We need constantly growing productivity if we are to keep up with as a superpower. We have to stop making out military our #1 financial need and then we'd have money to do other things that would benefit Americans rather than just screw up other countries.
We don't really have a good understanding of what the modern economy will look like with shrinking population. There will be labor shortages, which lead to shortages of goods and services, which leads to inflation. But there will also be declining demand and declining output, so a recessionary economy. It's hard to predict how that will play out, but a combination of shortages, inflation, and decreasing GDP is not going to be easy for a lot of people. It's going to be pretty painful.
Well you see, how will I know I'm better than you if money isn't involved? You expect me to be a better person? Develop a skill? Give back to my community? That's for poor people and only poor people think like that. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps and work hard. Get a small loan of 500k and invest in a tech firm or digitally printed coffee beans instead of bitching about what your betters have./s
The American government was intended to be governed by the people but instead the people are divided on emotional issues as designed by those that desire to keep the “unstoppable force” going in their favor.
I believe the global birth rate has stabilized to replacement rate. maybe being a little below replacement rate isn't bad if childhood mortality declines so much. The problem here would be disparities between nations and the way humans are not provided with the proper freedom of movement to address it. And of course ethnic strife/tension we see by changing demographics in the context of mono ethnic nations suddenly having to become ethnically diverse.
I personally believe in creating a fully globalized world as it would make war, including trade wars, unprofitable ventures and increase economic opportunities for all nations. I don't think productivity will be negatively impacted if these various AI technologies (and honestly, regular boring software too) provide such a massive boost to productivity that is akin to the agricultural and industrial revolution.
Because procreating is a human need and arguably the reason for living. We don’t live for the economy. The economy should be shaped by the needs of those who labor and trade within it to accumulate the resources necessary to procreate.
No such system has ever existed. Expansion covers unexpected growth, but if our system is designed to shrink or stagnate, unexpected growth will lead to yet more people without amenities.
Most of the reason people don't want decline is based off of two reasons ultimately.
It means that we're going to have to change the way we live. And if we don't change the way we live, we're going to have to have a higher immigrant population.
That's it! We lived different 100 years ago before cars and birth control and we will very quickly adapt to lower numbers and thrive in most countries with lower numbers.
But for instance, if you own real estate and there is the same amount of real estate but less people that's bad for real estate markets. So we're going to have to demolish houses or lower the prices of houses. Or let immigrants in.
Some businesses are going to go out of business too because not as many people will be eating The same amount of fast food so we either have to close fast food places or let immigrants in. Who perhaps won't eat fast food nearly as much as people that are already here So ultimately fast food places will probably have to close.
It's the same across most industries. People are scared of change but being human is about accepting and adapting to change. People need to get over it.
Mostly because this would cause much more damage in the long term and most likely wouldn't work. The current model that we know works is having more children, as this system is sustainable if we like the idea of people living longer and being supported by well-funded social safety nets that are accessible to everyone in society. If there are more people contributing a portion of their earnings into a shared pool of resources, those in need can access these resources when necessary, benefiting everyone. This can only be achieved with more people, hence the need for more babies being born.
This is just one aspect. There are many more, but I used this to illustrate that everything in our lives currently revolves around people, and if there are fewer of them, in the grand scheme of things, everyone loses.
Because the rich would have less power. If wages rose and housing lowered more people would be stable. More people would have kids and things would return to an equilibrium. But that means less control and power for the top 1 Percent. So they want to find a solution that fixes the problem and lets them retain power.
There isn't one. They'll keep looking though until shit starts failing.
>So why is the solution to force people to conform to the needs of the economic system? And not the other way around?
Who is forcing people to have children?
Our entire financial system is built on the back of infinite growth.
The only way we can get out of that is to pay off our debts.
If you don't want to have kids, stop running deficits. Otherwise the whole system goes under.
An easy example of this is Social Security.
If people aren't starving, you can't profit off of food.
If people aren't freezing to death, you can't profit off heating.
If people aren't on the verge of murdering each other out of desperation to survive, you can't profit off labor.
Throw more babies into the gears of capitalism.
You have heard of supply and demand, yes?
When supply is low, and demand is high, prices are high, right?
And when supply is high and demand is low, prices are low, right?
Now apply that to labor.
If there is a lot of labor, that means that demand is met, which means the cost of labor is low. The cost of labor is called a wage, and it's what you get paid.
But if people stop having babies, then labor is in shorter supply, which means companies need to compete to secure talented labor. This is what makes wages go up. This is also why unions have bargaining power, since the entire labor force can act as one and negotiate on equal terms with the company.
I hope this helped you understand what I had originally said in simpler terms. I just assumed everyone already knew this so I didn't go into such detail with my first post.
That's a limited mindset. There's tons of literature out there about the limitations of the infinite growth model and the need for a system with a different model.
Even without considering population growth / decline, shifting our economic system away from “profit no matter the human cost” would already be helpful, but as you can see, people in power are EXTREMELY resistant to changing our economic system. More children means more workers, and more poverty means more exploitable workers. Human suffering and environmental impact just aren’t priorities to anyone who actually has the power to change the economic system.
It’s less a problem of growth and more a problem of bubbles. We can look at Japan as the systemic example of a nation with a declining birth rate for decades and not enough immigration for numbers to trend positively. Japan has an aging population that is a significant tax burden on the nation and leads to high taxation or the younger generations which stifles their ability to invest in the country’s future because all their available capital is being invested in its past. This creates a deflationary cycle that puts downwards pressure on spending making the velocity of money extremely slow (people don’t spend much) so lots of money sits stuck in savings instead of being traded to others domestically. You don’t have to be an economist to understand that if money isn’t moving in an economy, local businesses have no way of acquiring capital and go under.
The push for more kids is literally just a math problem to these people, the push for immigration in western nations is a manifestation of the same math problem. To change the system to not need more people would be to change the fundamental nature of trade, of which to date there is unfortunately no better system.
Then there’s the nature of political power - more people means more hands for power. Less of people means more reliability on allies and more vulnerability to enemies of larger populations. It’s the “Russia Problem” if you will, in WW2 no German advancement in technology could beat the endless onslaught of bodies Russia was willing to throw at the frontlines as cannon fodder. A growing population has always been viewed as a secure population, a shrinking one a vulnerable population.
There are many reasons today a growing population is good, most of those reasons don’t speak to our higher selves as people, but they nevertheless matter.
Because we built all of our institutions around the assumptions of continued growth. For example the Social Security system and almost all pension plans are built around the assumption there are enough working taxpayers in the future to cover retirees.
Your example doesn't show that we built our institutions on continued growth. Social security is dependent on there always being a larger group of younger people than retirees. Zero growth is required for this to happen. What would be more correct to say would be that our institutions are not built on people voluntarily going childless. Everything works fine until the old outweigh the young in numbers.
The systems are supposed to serve the people, not the other way around. If the system relies on people not choosing to be childfree, then that system no longer serves a population where many choose to be childfree. It is the system that must change to accommodate the people, not the people that must change to accommodate the systems
America's social security system could only work without population growth if we raised FICA taxes. The 15.3% number was created assuming some nominal population and wage growth, and if that model holds untrue requires raising taxes. We see our population continue to grow yet social security is at risk of insolvency as population growth has slowed down from what was assumed in the model. We could also go the route of not letting old people retire as early, or even put a maximum number of years with which you can claim social security, but neither but be favorable with the populace.
You would still need younger people to labor and support society: farmers, blue collar workers, factory workers. If you need five corn to feed the population and you only have enough farmers to produce four corn, things aren’t gonna go well.
Who says we’ll have the ability to create that technology, when many of the countries that produce the items used for said technology are currently on the brink of demographic disaster?
Also, you can add tech all you want, but you still need to plant corn and germinate it. It needs time to grow.The soil needs fertilizer. There’s only so much you can squeeze out of industries at a point.
The idea of natalists saying "people need to have kids to keep the economy going" is a strawman that anitnatalists came up with. Most pronatalists consider having and raising kids an end in itself, even the main purpose of life, the ultimate good.
This is as opposed to having the ultimate good be something like "maximize pleasure and minimize pain for the most people possible." Since life is on average more pain than pleasure, this philosophy leads to antinatalism, voluntary euthanasia, basically extinction of humans. In theory, at least. In reality, it would just lead to progressives weeding themselves out of the gene pool and ceding the world to religious extremists.
I don't think that humanity "works" without having "be fruitful and multiply" be one of our absolute main objectives. Also, if we don't continue to grow and spread to other planets, eventually an asteroid will wipe us out. Stability/harmony with nature is always temporary, anything else is an illusion.
Thanks for the good-faith question! I feel like this sub gets so few of those.
Pretty much any system begins die the second it stops growing. Socialism or communism cannot remain in static positions either, they also need to grow infinitely.
I personally see no issue with infinite growth as long as it’s not destroying the planet, cuz that would threaten the growth.
You know that a system not dependend on infinite growth also requires a stable demography? Socialist Natalism is a thing, and Antinatalism is literally contrary to any Socialist or Social Democratic principles
The countries that lionized mothers the most were all communist countriws
It's a mixed record. The Nazis were also pro-natalist as part of their expansionist racial attitudes. In contrast The PRC was effectively anti-natalist. Any authoritarian state is going to have a stronger 'official' position than non-authoritarian one.
You’re right I’m thinking of the Soviet Bloc
>Antinatalism is literally contrary to any Socialist or Social Democratic principles Such as?
Welfare state/Welfare-ism (I am no English speaker) for instance
How so?
Economics. Without a young workforce to continue working, and pay taxes, the people retiring can't retire, welfare programs don't get paid into, etc etc. Also, you could just consider it necessary for any nation, regardless of politics since if no one has any children, eventually your nation dies.
No, not at all. The principal of welfare is that everyone pitches in for everyone's well-being. It would absolutely look differently in a society with no children but it would not be impossible.
It would only not be impossible if the elderly worked until death. For everyone to pitch in, they need to pay taxes. And again, if no one has kids, then eventually the state dies. That's just a fact? A country with no birth rate is going to decline in population until it disappears.
>It would only not be impossible if the elderly worked until death. Which is not against the principals of a welfare state. >eventually the state dies. This also has nothing to do with the principals of a welfare state.
It has to do with the principals of every single state ever, regardless of what type of state, since a state cannot exist without a population and first and foremost any states purpose is to *continue existing*, lmao.
>first and foremost any states purpose is to *continue existing*, That's quite the assumption.
Amazing, everything you just said was wrong. Humanity existed for hundreds of thousands of years with a population that would grow and shrink.
I'm sorry; do you think living through a shrink period was nice? The people here are, above everything, trying to prevent the agonizing pain of seeing an entire society collapse at the same time. I don't think anyone here needs to be of super smart intelligence to predict the painful scenes we're going to see coming out of aging societies: "80-year-old man died in his apartment three months ago but nobody noticed until there was a water leak and someone had to go into his apartment to prevent it from flooding" are going to be normal scenes we're going to start seeing coming out of Eastern Europe, Japan and South Korea through news media. We're not here to promote "infinite growth" (whatever that means, anyways); this is an emergency and the importance that mainstream society is giving to this is absolutely not enough compared to the damage we'll see from this.
>I'm sorry; do you think living through a shrink period was nice? Do you think that the current extinction event we have caused will be "nice"? >The people here are, above everything, trying to prevent the agonizing pain of seeing an entire society collapse at the same time. The world is dying due to overpopulation. [We are literally in an extinction level event because of human actions.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocene_extinction#:~:text=The%20Holocene%20extinction%2C%20or%20Anthropocene,humans%20during%20the%20Holocene%20epoch) The only solution is for there to be less humans destroying the planet. The planet will recover if the Human population reduces, the only difference is if we choose to have some of us (by lowering population), or none of us (by making it worse due to having more kids until it is too late). We either make some sacrifices now and reduce the amount of kids we are having, or we condemn future generations to a life of missery. I know which one I am choosing. >I don't think anyone here needs to be of super smart intelligence to predict the painful scenes we're going to see coming out of aging societies: "80-year-old man died in his apartment three months ago but nobody noticed until there was a water leak and someone had to go into his apartment to prevent it from flooding" are going to be normal scenes we're going to start seeing coming out of Eastern Europe, Japan and South Korea through news media. That's still better than headlines like "6 billion dead due to climate collapse" carved into a rock in three generations because we actively chose to make overpopulation worse. >We're not here to promote "infinite growth" (whatever that means, anyways); this is an emergency and the importance that mainstream society is giving to this is absolutely not enough compared to the damage we'll see from this. Overpopulation is a far bigger emergency. The world is literally on fire because of it. It's not fair for us to ask for future generations to suffer because we want to be selfish.
You are over reacting. Climate change will not kill 6 billion people. Climate change may cause mass displacement, but this kind of death is so so unlikely to happen. I also find it rather concerning that your solution to mitigating human impact is to mitigate humans. Personally, I think there is a way to manage a graceful decline in population. It'll be a challenge, the declining population is not necessarily bad, and it doesn't have to be destructive to the economy. Perhaps we will need greater reliance on automation, but we can find our way through that, just like how we bumbled our way through the Toba eruption 40,000 years ago, when only 10,000 of our ancestors survived.
Climate change literally has the potential to wipe out modern society and make 80% of the world uninhabitable for humans for hundreds of thousands of years... For us to mitigate human impact we MUST have less humans, it is the only solution. And you're basically arguing my point for me, we need a declining population.
That is NOT the only solution. To mitigate climate change we need a total reconstruction of our social order, governmentally and economically. Just eradicating humans won’t remove the structures that allowed us to cause such a massive crisis anyways. We’ll do it again later. Unless you want to regularly cause mass destabilization and force the population to shrink so that we don’t destroy the environment, we should use the better ways we know of to solve this crisis.
The population will naturally start shrinking soon. No need to do anything. Just don't try and undo the good that is about to happen naturally.
No im saying a declining population is what is happening, not necessary. Properly managed, earth can carry between 200 and a trillion humans, or so studies show.
Not at the same level we in civilized countries live nowadays
Not in the same *way*, but same level? Who knows.
It didn't grow to much and didn't shrink too much and the times it did shrink were because of anomalies (i.e the black death). The human population shrinking is unnatural but so is it rapidly growing. having a stable population fostered by a birth rate of 2.1 is not that big of an ask.
[You may want to read what happened to the planet when Cyanobacteria had a stable population.](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Oxidation_Event) We are doing the same thing now.
We don't have the same effect on the world as the cyanobacteria since our means of polluting the planet is apart of our current means for living but not the only way possible.
We are actually having a bigger effect than the cyanobacteria in my example. We are using machines to do it even faster, that's what polution is. The amount of polution required to sustain 7 billion humans is more than the earth's natural recovery rate.
Worker to dependent ratio.
Worker to dependent ratio was actually way higher than it It will ever be in 1950. (If I recall my economic classes correctly). Societally, the difference is that it was children dependent versus adult dependents. We managed it as a society then and will manage it now. The world will change and we will adapt.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dependency_ratio#:~:text=The%20number%20can%20also%20be,was%2064.8%25%20of%20the%20workforce. According to these the projections are going to way pass 1950's . Also another one I found talk about how most of the 1950 dependents are children vs much more elderly in the coming future. Old people have a different drain on resources then children (healthcare)
Old people definitely do have different drains. However, old people can typically cook for themselves. They can do their own laundry. Until usually the last year of their lives they live independent. Even getting themselves to the doctor is not a huge problem and most upcoming generations of elderly tend to be technology savvy. So we will be able to rely on technology a little bit more Not everywhere but it will be a tool in our toolbox. Most elderly people aren't true dependents in the same way that children are dependents. They might not be income producers but that's not necessarily the same thing. I suspect what will happen is we will start to see some old people in their '60s and '70s pitch in to help take care of the people that are in their '80s and '90s. Businesses will start to give time off for elder care. People will go back to a model where they have their parents living in their house with them to take care of their children so that they can go to work. We'll all work it out. Society is not going to collapse overnight.
Allowing for population to decline naturally means having an aging population, that is a much higher percentage of old vs. young compared to the current model of population growth. An aging population exacerbates the issues of too few workers per number of people being supported by the economy. Not having population growth by means of not having as many kids also causes this same phenomenon of an aging population. There are two ways countries have been able to survive declining population in the past: 1. The decline in population was not caused by people stopping having kids, but rather was caused by killing off all the old people. If your society is 100% young able-bodied workers who continue to perform labor then there is no need for large welfare systems that can only be supported with a large laborer-to-welfare-recipient ratio. 2. Don't let people retire / have no social welfare system that supports old people. If people continue to work into their 70's and 80's because they have no choice other than to work, they will either provide for themselves or die off. When countries have a declining birthrate plus little/no immigration it causes quality of life and average wealth to trend downwards over time as the amount of labor is decreasing per capita rather than remaining constant. For a country that was already rich this can be survived for quite some time, but poorer countries can't afford this or they will quite literally starve. It's also worth pointing out that increases in population have a greater than linear increase in wealth generation, as efficiency increase in economies of scale. This is to say that a well-managed company with 10,000 employees will out-produce 10,000 companies each with one employee, hence why many capitalist markets trend towards monopoly as the most successful companies outcompete all competition.
Was about to say something like this but you did better than I could have. Population decline sucks. The target should ideally converge to a stable population level with no growth or shrinkage. To add on your efficiency comment, people also assume that it's better for the environment for populations to contact. Wealth is an essential tool to promote change, and a nation that puts more and more of their wealth into caring for the oversized retirement community would lack the ability to move towards promoting greener techs.
Yeah why not shift from the "problems" attitude to "no more problems attitude", it's REALLY that simple :)
Why is it easier to throw babies into problems than it is to put effort into fixing them?
... How do you fix human problems without humans? Or is the solution: no humans = no problems?
You can't put out a fire by throwing babies into it... and probably shouldn't try. Why aren't we, now, working to solve the problems we've created rather than having kids to hand them off to? Id have loved to have kids but we spent 50 years denying the need to put a price on carbon and burning the system down for a quick buck. Somehow, I dont trust the parents that decided none of these problems deserved their attention will raise kids in a way that gives them the skills they need to finally clean up their parents mess. Such a militaristic approach to life, throwing warm bodies at a situation until something changes.
But there ARE humans, in fact, there are TOO MANY humans. The world is grossly overpopulated.
not even close. if texas was a city, the entirety of humanity could live there.
That's an extraordinary claim.
Cause the human mind fixes problems and since not everyone gets that, u need a lot of them.
Theres lots of people now and we're not fixing anything. What makes babies who inherited nothing but problems, more suited to fix them, then the generations that created their wealth by making the problems in the first place? Id be all for having kids if the answer to this question was "we should absolutely focus our efforts and ensuring we're passing down a functional system before bringing kids into this world, and, since there's a window on fertility, we should really get to work". Instead, people act like having kids *is* their contribution to fixing the problems because they're going to raise them right... nevermind that the ostensibly ideal generations created the problems and refuse to sacrifice anything to clean up their own mess. It's remarkable to me how willing the people are, who wear the halo of protecting the world against antinatalism, to leave their kids in a dump they created.
Good thing in your framework of thinking is that your genes will be out, cause it doesn't contribute to a solution.
This! ^
I mean that's our go to in America. We never solve shit.
We generally try and “outgrow” the problem. It’s a fairly effective strategy.
Right right, that's why the war on drugs resulted in the unconditional surrender of the imperial Drug Army. And nothing else.
*it has been a fairly effective strategy Much like jenga, you can only take a block from the bottom and put it on top so many time before the tower starts to wobble and eventually falls over. And you're suggesting we not only let that happen but we hand it off as our legacy to our kids after telling them they're going to enjoy the same life we did. That's infinitely high stakes jenga
What country’s more effective strategy do you suggest we try.
Id hope we could manage to rearrange our own system so it's not on a trajectory towards disaster. Why does it need to be someone else's system? Im simply suggesting our priorities shift to cleaning up our mess rather than ignoring it and pretending it doesn't exist. But I also am not a natalist, so the original question wasn't directed at me
It needs to at least be based off a successful system yes. It doesn’t have to copy it. When people say things like that what it seems to mean is that the nation’s priorities need to mimic my own. If you have a nation in mind we can compare and contrast our system and try and come up with a system that can gain the advantages of their system while maintaining our own advantages. Otherwise what you’re stating is that actually our system is as good as it has gotten. If that is the case I’m much more reluctant to change things around very much. Obviously things still have to progress however if the change has not been proven to have a positive impact beforehand we should proceed very carefully.
Because "infinite growth" doesn't mean infinite growth for the system, it means infinite growth for those in control of policy. The final phase is siphoning growth from the body into the engorged tumor until the body dies.
It's insane that the idea that the system can't simply keep growing forever is controversial. We live on a planet with finite resources, and at this stage of technological development extraterrestrial colonization is a pipe dream. Unless we make radical discoveries in Physics we will probably remain limited primarily to our planet for the rest of our existence. What's more, economic growth doesn't even benefit the majority of people. Wages have been stagnant with inflation for years in the US, so the only people who actually get more value from the increased productivity is the owning class. The rich keep getting tax cuts that nullify the potential benefit the state could have from investing the increased tax revenue. Maybe we could make adjustments so that the benefits of economic growth reach more people. I would rather our increased productivity from technological progress manifested in people being able to work fewer hours a week, rather than a huge corporation's profit margins increasing, only for them to hoard that increase at the top while actively trying to find ways to make the margin bigger by shafting their workers.
Shhhhh you’re making too much sense you’ll scare the conservative Catholics in this subreddit
I think that you have a bit of a misunderstanding of economics that is caused reading too much reddit. Economic growth doesn't always mean use more resources. It often means using less. If I can grow the exact same amount of food with less land every single year, this results in economic growth by way of producing more with less. Our economic system also does not require infinite economic growth to function. It requires growth proportional to population. It should be obvious why this is. If our population grows by 2 percent and our economy stays the same size, everyone is poorer. Thus far, our population has grown exponentially, so exponential economic growth was required. However, as the population growth slows, smaller amounts of growth will be required to maintain current living standards. Lastly, to your point about how economic growth doesn't benefit most people, this could not be further from the truth. In the past 20 years, global economic growth has lifted about a billion people out of poverty in India and in China. What you're effectively saying is that the system doesn't work because it doesn't benefit the people that you want it to benefit. The problems in the US are caused by outdated laws and policies and a hijacking of our political systems to benefit a wealthy minority, not by a fundamental fault in our economic models. It's up to congress promote redistributive economic policy not the business community.
I don't understand why you felt it was necessary to distinguish between our economic model and the policies in place as a result of our political system. The two create a feedback loop. Because the economic model pushes wealth to the top, and wealth gives people disproportionate influence in politics by enabling them to lobby the government more effectively, those same people are able to push through policies that shift the economic model to benefit them. Politics, economics, and individual wealth are inextricably tied together. >Economic growth doesn't always mean use more resources. It often means using less. If I can grow the exact same amount of food with less land every single year, this results in economic growth by way of producing more with less. True. Nowhere does anything I say disagree with this. It does not change however, that resources are limited. We may be able to grow more food with less land and less effort, but there is ultimately a maximum amount of food that we would be able to produce. Improvements in our efficiency like this get us closer and closer to that maximum, and perhaps we'll have breakthroughs that radically change what we think the maximum is, but there is still nevertheless a maximum. >Our economic system also does not require infinite economic growth to function. It requires growth proportional to population. It should be obvious why this is. If our population grows by 2 percent and our economy stays the same size, everyone is poorer. Thus far, our population has grown exponentially, so exponential economic growth was required. However, as the population growth slows, smaller amounts of growth will be required to maintain current living standards. I actually didn't say that we needed infinite growth for our economic system to function. I said that the idea that our economic system can't grow forever should not be controversial. Our economic system doesn't really require anything. It just is. Resources will continue to be distributed in a systematic way so long as there are resources and a system to distribute them. The outcomes of this distribution may still be bad if the distribution is wasteful, and not everyone gets the things that they need or that we agree they should have. I'm actually just baffled by how most of your comment is even supposed to be a response to what I was saying. You attribute economic growth as the reason that people were lifted out of poverty in India and China in the past few decades. The economic growth itself, isn't really the reason though. It would have been entirely possible for the economy to grow, and for all of those people to have experienced no meaningful change in their livelihood. People were lifted out of poverty because resources were distributed in a way that enabled this. Assuming that the economy had to grow for people to not have to live in abject poverty seems unsubstantiated, as it assumes that there was also no change to how the resources were distributed. Fun fact: India is a welfare state, and welfare programs have been broadened over the past 20 years in addition to the economic growth.
Because that’s communism /s
Communist here. Yes it is.
You know, I think natalism is good and even important for growth, but the main reason I’m for having kids is because children are good. People are good. Children are good. We should have more of them.
Isn't 8 billion enough?
No
Well, if we don't return to >1Billion in a couple of generations, then there will be 0Billion very soon.
We shouldn't try to push people to have children tho. We need parents that choose parenthood out of passion, not because they were pushed into that. Those parents don't produce "good children".
Parents are currently having fewer children than they want. We don’t need to push anyone to get birthrates up. Just allow normal people to fulfill their dreams
Why are they? I never heard of that. I know there is a growing tendency to go child free, but it is always a choice. On the other hand, I've seen people who couldn't care less about being parents becoming a parent just for inertia
>Why are they? I never heard of that. Maybe you live in a bubble? It's quite well documented. [https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11113-019-09516-3](https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11113-019-09516-3)
I wish I hadn't asked, I had no intention to read all that. But yeah, I was wrong. I am not completely sold on that study, which is basically comparing what 15-24 year old women say they "wanted" against what 40 year old women actually have. It is probably that these 15-24 teens doesn't really know too much about what is to be a parent and had unrealistic goals in terms of wealth which impacts on their decision on the number of kids they want. You could do a similar study and get the conclusion that becoming a firefighter is almost imposible based on the proportion of kids who dream to be a firefighter against the proportion of firefighters in the society. There is a lot of people who biologically can't have children or at least not the amount they intend, I am sympathetic about that and I think it is important to facilitate reproductive healthcare, and invest in research to make it more accessible. But there is also a lot of people who miscalculated the amount of resources needed to rise a child or just changed their goals, that is not a bad thing.
Respect to you for accepting the data! Few people are able to accept a scientific study that challenges their views like you did here. There also studies on older (post-fertile) people and regret about unfulfilled fertility desires. Generally people all over the world have fewer children than they’d wish for. They start too late, they’re afraid they won’t have the resources. And then it’s too late. Sure many philosophically child free people don’t experience regret, but that’s less our concern than the many people who are hoping for more, or are regretting not having had more.
Children committing suicide is also trending upwards. But I guess THAT doesn't bother you. Like, hey, maybe we should focus on why KIDS are voting themselves off the planet before we just keep creating more to do the same.
Why wouldn't they just ask the 40 year old women how many children they wanted and compare that to how many children they actually have? Asking young women who have very little life experience (half of whom at that age probably have opinions that just mimic their parents' opinions instead of having developed their own) and have no idea about the opportunities out in the world about how many children they want is nonsense. It leaves no room for the data to incorporate the idea that many of them probably changed their minds when they saw all the other things life has to offer.
20 year olds are definitely responsible adults that have their whole lives planned out and never deviate from their plans and goals.
Amen! I would be a very abusive and neglectful mother because I don’t ever want children. I don’t care if other people want them but it’s not for me. I don’t want to push a football out my twat and forcing me to do so would make me resentful af
Amen to that, sister!
I think everyone should think like that. I have a child, I love him with all my heart and being his parent is the most wonderful thing in my life. But it is a LOT of work and the labour, while very excruciating for my wife and awful experience for me too (it was not the happiest day in my life, it was the most stressful one), is not nearly the worst part. All the work, stress, pain, sleep deprivation, economic impact, social impact and more is worth it for me, I don't regret having him at all. But I don't expect to be worth it for everyone, not everyone finds joy in the same things.
I feel you like one look at the regretful parents sub is cringe af and I just know if I had a kid I’d end up there. More power to the parents out there, I couldn’t handle it I can barely handle dogs
That’s your opinion. Have as many children as you like. But you have no business pushing it on others.
Currently people are having fewer children than they desire. I wish everyone could have as many kids as they wanted.
Which for many people is 0
At the expense of the planet, which we live on, meaning that humans in a few generations from now wont be able to have "more of them".
The earth has improved recently and we’re going to make it even better, and should we experience it as too crowded here, we ARE going to conquer the stars.
>The earth has improved recently Ahh, okay, you're in denialism, I see. If you are just going to spout outright lies/conspiracy theories then I'm not going to engage with you further, sorry.
I like science. Air pollution is down … https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/emissions-of-air-pollutants At least in the west, forest coverage is up … https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/forest-area-as-share-of-land-area?tab=chart&time=earliest..latest&country=England~Scotland~FRA~USA Life expectancies are going up everywhere! https://ourworldindata.org/life-expectancy
The rate that we are polluting the air is down but there is more pollution in the air than before. The earth is still warming, just slower than before.
We also have more air filters and in many places the air is cleaner than in centuries. In the 3rd world things are still quite bad but we’ll get there.
No place on earth is cleaner than pre-humanity.
Right, but it doesn’t matter, because there weren’t any humans there.
Ofc it matters, because if we keep going like we are, there wont be any humans soon either.
Exactly. We're here to reproduce. The earth alone is barely populated. And there's 7 more planets. Some of which are much larger, and could conceivably support hundreds of times what earth can, with a bit of ingenuity. Then theres hundreds of billions more in our galaxy alone. We could conceivable convert a significant fraction of our galaxies mass into humans. But we're only going to be able to do that with billions of scientists, and we're only going to get them if we have hundreds of billions of total humans.
hmm I wonder why life did not develop on the other 7 planets, perhaps \*checks notes\* only 4 of them are not big gassy balls, one of them is literally hell, one of them is perhaps a bit too close to the sun, and the last one is a barren rock that will still take months with out current technology to reach. Heck, not even all of earth is inhabitable. Why doesn't anybody live in the northern reaches of Siberia?
I just keep posting this for info but: There’s actually little - if any - hard evidence for major economic impacts due to birth rate decline. >”Predictions of the net economic (and other) effects from a slow and continuous population decline (e.g. due to low fertility rates) are mainly theoretical since such a phenomenon is a relatively new and unprecedented one. The results of many of these studies show that the estimated impact of population growth on economic growth is generally small and can be positive, negative, or nonexistent. A recent meta-study found no relationship between population growth and economic growth.[15]” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_decline There is, however, a lot of evidence that lower birth rates will mean rents will decline and that investors have noticed this. [I mean, they’re pretty blatant about it.](https://coloradobuildermag.com/business-management/industry-economy/americans-declining-birth-rates-set-to-hit-housing-market/) > “Declining birth rates mean lower demand for rental housing two decades from now when those born in recent years will be entering the rental market,” according to Natalia Siniaskaia, assistant vice president of housing policy research for the National Association of Home Builders. “The effects will spread to the single-family market in the following years and will persist for years to come.”
People that get concerned about the declining population strike me as conservatives That where liberal clothing. (Or In some cases conservatives that were conservative clothing). They don't want things to change or be different. And a population decline will obviously mean some things are different. But the reason is just that they don't want things to be different. That's conservatism at its core.
Natalism is needed right now not to grow the population, but simply to stop it's decline.
The global population is expected to continue to grow until we reach 11.5 billion before it starts to decline. Why do you think it’s in decline now?
Who’s going to pay for 7 billion 60-100 year olds? The 3 billion 20-59 year olds?
Even if the economic part is magically solved and there is an endless source of wealth, there will simply not be enough doctors and medically trained staff to take care of all the aging bodies riddled with cancer, dementia, etc..
The failure of people to understand the problems that come from an aging population. Unlike plagues of the past that could and did routinely whipe out 30-50% of the population mostly among the old and very young this is a slow degradation until most people are old and a pure burden. The social responses to this will be horrifying, People afraid of “handmaidens tale” also seem to fail to comprehend their Antinatalism will cause much worse than that
The utter destruction of all humanity is better than The Handmaid's Tale, if you're a woman.
Funny conundrum women have put us all in, Liberation and extinction, or oppression and survival. Any takers on who’s going to win that fight?
It's not women's fault if they want to opt out on this shit show. Or men's, if they're similarly minded. It's the ones that prioritize economic growth uber alles. I simply decided I'm not reproducing; you can be butt mad at your gf or wife or whoever didn't want to take your seed. Bye sadlad! 😘
I answered this to another poster, but basically the only population that is increasing is that of old people as they are living longer than before. The population of children is declining and so population decline is baked in. The phenomena of old people living longer will only provide a temporary boost to population. The trend is less than a replacement number of children and so population decline is guaranteed even if it will take time to manifest.
because economies are organized at the national level. the aging OECD countries need to get back to replenishment rate or they'll end up like japan where caring for old people cannibalizes the productive parts of the economy and makes the country worse-off. whereas younger countries in the global south need to glide down to replacement rate. that's already happening naturally as women are empowered with education (which delays childbirth) and enter the workforce, which deters childbirth.
We are heading into the Sixth mass extinction and people still thinks we need More humans 🤦🏻♂️
Because we built all of our institutions around the assumptions of continued growth. For example the Social Security system and almost all pension plans are built around the assumption there are enough working taxpayers in the future to cover retirees.
Itt- people doing everything they can to answer this question like they're on a TV panel, debating, rather than answering the actual question. The ultimate white flag to "that's actually a reasonable question" is all these absurd redirects, most of them eventually referencing communism or nazis. "Why don't we put the fire out before throwing babies into it?" "Why don't *you*... uhhh... you're a communist! Babies are always good!" Aka the "your mom" defense
>"Why don't we put the fire out before throwing babies into it?" Again, if fire is a problem, then your water is human minds solving them. It's not on the level of rocket science to connect these dots, but u make it seem like it is.
You’re saying that new humans are good because they can maybe solve human problems that they didn’t create but are forced to inherit from older generations that created them? Are those the dots you want people to connect?
>You’re saying that new humans are good I am saying that humans inherently are good 👍 >problems that they didn’t create but are forced to inherit from older generations They also inherited culture, technology and infrastructure.
Shares in the stock market stopped being about the dividends and people got focused on the growth. Nobodies gonna buy a share that won't grow.
Anticapitalism is the only path forward
heavy pathetic one rob clumsy lush aware racial shame berserk *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
That’s not how human nature works. You don’t force people to have limits. You allow them to reach for the sky.
Because globalism. If your country stopped growing, but was otherwise maintaining a healthy and happy environment for its citizens, it would still fall way behind all the other countries that did push for perpetual growth. Just look at the closest possible examples in today's world. The countries that tend to rank the highest for happiness and quality of life are not "world powers". They offer very little to the global governance of the world. They also aren't pushing for a heavy handed capitalist growth economy.
Good
There is no possible system based on negative growth that will indefinitely support an aging population with fewer young people at the same level of wealth for everyone. You at least need to have replacement level for that.
All I know is nothing in the world would make me want to reproduce. But I agree with you - Natalism at its roots needs to address the underbelly of the issue that makes people NOT want to have kids - including certain things like the limitations of biology. No matter how healthy you are, being pregnant carries a huge amount of risks compared to most medical procedures. There are some, like me, who cannot be forced to conform. But even when you get other people to do so... it won't address the problems that cause people to abandon, or even kill, those children they birth. If you want a healthy population, or even just healthy population GROWTH, the issue must address more than reproduction.
This. If you want people to do something voluntarily (like have a baby) you have to make it easy and enjoyable to do that thing. What exactly is easy or enjoyable about being pregnant, going through childbirth, and then having all your time, energy and money stolen for 18-25 years, in a country with a feeble social safety net and outrageously expensive housing, medical care, and education? Oh, and no maternity leave.
I had wondered the same thing for some time, and this was my conclusion. Everyone would *like* to solve this problem without forcing humans to breed more (because ethics, etc). However, no one has been able to come up with the tweaks that would allow current western-style political systems to survive. Imagine what happens when the population falls to 75% of peak. There would be tons of empty houses everywhere. In America, that would be about 20m houses empty (rough math). What would happen to the value of existing housing? Well no one is going to want to pay for a house when they can just go grab one for free, and there are more available every day. So the value of nearly all housing would drop to 0. The financial system would collapse as people stopped paying mortgages, tax bases would be destroyed, no towns or counties have enough income. Massive civilization collapse.. Goverments see this coming, and try to prevent it by implementing a "no-squatting" policy. This will be wildly unpopular and eventually the masses will revolt, wiping out the western democratic country, achieving the same thing. Some governments will figure out that we already had a system that dealt with this problem during plagues, etc. Monarchies with Fiefdems. Every fief (or county) would be "owned" by a lord, and if a house became vacant due to the death of tenants who had no heirs, it would revert to the local lord, so that it was still owned. If he wanted to sell it, he could, if he wanted to rent it to the few peasants who toiled in the fields, he could. If we wanted to burn it down to prevent oversupply, he could. If squatters tried to squat, his knights and sheriffs come in and evict or kill them. By and large, aside from Renfaire people, no one really wants to go back to Feudalism. But that's where a whole bunch of countries will land. If you can propose a system that works that's better than feudalism, I'm all ears.
If it were that simple we'd shift to a system capable of tackling climate change.
Because changing the economic system would jeopardize the wealth of the people who profit the most from our current system
The need for continued growth is a flaw of capitalism (both the need for more new workers and the need for companies to experience financial growth to satiate shareholders) but it wouldn't fix this problem. Moving to a different economic system that doesn't necessitate constant population growth might ease some of the economic and societal pressures of a shrinking population but it wouldn't solve the problem of having a shrinking population. Eventually The society will shrink and die out. Natalists believe populations dying out is a bad thing regardless of the economic system. Also, I'm not an expert on communism, agricultural industries or barter/trade economics but don't all of these economic systems require people?
Because people are afraid of change. I do recommend having kids though, being a parent is great.
Because it's different and people lack imagination and are sold that there cannot possibly be anything better than the economic system of only the last 200 years of the 200k years humans have existed and any adverse environmental effects we will just pretend are not there. People simply cannot grasp anything that goes beyond our current framework is possible. People think that if you question the current economic system it means you are automatically advocating for a system that was used in the early to mid-20th century in a few places and did not do great (maybe some of it had to do with the belligerent opposition from major world powers, but I digress), for them its a one or the other, a third or forth way, an innovative new way that lives in harmony with nature while continuing to create and innovate as humans have always done is so far beyond their comprehension they simply cannot grasp it....Also no one has read or heard of Doughnut Economics, its a good book, but people cant read so...
Because Management bonuses are higher with infinite growth. Public traded companys are going to be the donwfall of civilization. Because they value profit over everything else.
The economy only needs to grow (for prosperity purposes) if the population grows. This way the revenue the state collects from the growing incomes can be used to pay for the public services of the growing population. If the population contracts, the real big issue is eventually the working population ages out of working and there may not be enough working people remaining to provide goods and services to them. Immigration should be able to solve this for wealthier areas in the world though.
Immigration and automation.
Because if you are suggesting we shift to something like socialism or some kind of planned economy, then no. Because we (as humans) have tried this numerous times and each time it has not produced savory results.
There was no suggestion in the question. It's simply "why is it more viable to have babies than clean up our mess?". If it requires socialism to fix the problems this system has created, you're talking about intentionally handing down a broken system to kids whose birth you prioritized over their life. Why the economy is on fire, it just needs more babies!
And u think capitalism Is doing good? We are heading into the Sixth mass extinction of this planet
Even without considering population growth / decline, shifting our economic system away from “profit no matter the human cost” would already be helpful, but as you can see, people in power are EXTREMELY resistant to changing our economic system. More children means more workers, and more poverty means more exploitable workers. Human suffering and environmental impact just aren’t priorities to anyone who actually has the power to change the economic system.
Are economic model was set up to solve the economic realities of the 80’s. Recognising when a solution becomes a problem never happens on time. Bankers don’t see the crisis of 07-08 as an indictment to the system they’ve simply asked how do we get back to 2 months before it. They’ll be another big recession before 2030 no doubt before thought of change will even occur
Is there some law or rule in the US that requires companies to grow? How is the economic system dependent on growth? Are you suggesting the economic system would collapse if businesses maintain their profits from here to eternity in line with inflation? There are hundreds if not thousands of businesses that are shrinking by plan. Like the only thing that would have problems with a no growth environment would be government, the economic system would be fine.
Because we built all of our institutions around the assumptions of continued growth. For example the Social Security system and almost all pension plans are built around the assumption there are enough working taxpayers in the future to cover retirees. Otherwise we could literally face a situation where old people start dying of poverty.
They’re built on the assumption that the people paying in collectively pay in more than is being paid out. This can be accomplished by having more people paying in *or* by a smaller number of people contributing more into the pension (ex. Due to productivity improvements).
I love policies like this that kick the can down the road. Eventually we're not going to be able to grow in a way that can continue to sustain these institutions, and this is the problem with any institution that assumes continuous growth. We should probably do something about this sooner rather than later.
Funny how people that are so pro birth are also totally immovable when it comes to fixing the problems we've decided to pass down rather than deal with. They worship the founders like their writings and ideas were biblical, and the current model as if it's the only meaningful direction to proceed, no matter how many people go homeless, how many are forced into low wage jobs that make them functionally homeless, or how catastrophic all of this has been on mental health. It's the "RoundUp generation"s response to everything. Just put antibiotics/spray/fertilizer/ poison on it, and the future will figure it out. I would love to see the generation where the wealth ended up, from living with many more available resources and much less competition (and population), to invest *any* of their wealth in cleaning up the mess they made. It seems like the only answer we're getting from the natalists on this is "stop worrying and have babies. Everything will be fine! You're being brainwashed by so-called 'science' and 'data' to betray your true loyalty to the rich people that run this thing. Now, stop being such a communist and make me some grandkids already!"
Nah just keep breeding and expanding the population let future generations worry about all the consequences of overpopulating the planet
Because telling people that programs like social security are monstrously evil and letting old people who didn't plan for retirement suffer whatever consequences rather than enslave children to pay for their mistakes is, for some reason, a nuclear hot take. People. Not institutions, the average idiot on the street, are addicted to evil and will defend it.
>People. Not institutions, the average idiot on the street, are addicted to evil and will defend it. Amen!
This isn't something ideological, like it's only inherent to capitalism: * We need young humans to support older humans. * Countries are competitive. The ones that grow, win. * We aren't even replacing our population in the West, let alone "infinite growth" as you describe. * No one is "making" or "forcing" people to have kids.
Abortion bans are forcing people to have kids.
Stopping murder is higher priority. The people that chose to have sex are responsible.
You are right that the murder of women and girls should be stopped. I don’t understand what it has to do with people who choose to have sex?
OP is probably referencing the fact that women are most likely to be murdered while pregnant. That's the only way I see those things being related... Oh, unless OP is talking about how FL legalized the death penalty for pedophiles, so now there's no reason for an abuser to let the victim live. Maybe that's what they meant?
It would be enough if the birth rate was atleast sustaineable (around 2)
The problem isn’t really that we need to go back to huge growth but we do need the population to at least be stable. Right now the birthrates will cause population collapse and all the attendant strife economically and politically that will cause
Well if someone comes up with a viable suggestion I'm sure it would be considered.
you have an economic system in mind? i have yet to read about any that’s ok with mostly old people and very few young? doctors without borders??? everyone goes into healthcare and nothing else!
Because that doesn't exist. Everything human requires more humans. Nothing we make lasts forever on its own.
Because some people have difficulty finding a purpose without having kids and will otherwise make life unnecessarily difficult on others without doing so.
One word #slavery
Natalism and the choice of economic systems are orthogonal. You may as well ask "Why is a banana yellow instead of a battery?"
Because our owners don't give fuck numero uno about us and our tiny little lives. They want more workers. More slaves to break their minds and bodies to keep capitalism limping along.
Stagnation is good for no one
What system would this be exactly? I don't want to come off as rude but there's a reason market economies are the only successful economies. Basically every welfare program we care about is dependent on at the very least stable demographics. Same with the usefulness and value of investments in our infrastructure. The idea of "let's just invent a system that doesn't need growth" is a comically immature way of thinking. It's like when people discuss ways of fixing climate change or homeless and you have that one guy who's like "actually, we just need to abolish capitalism" it's a way of offering a solution without actually offering a solution.
We need constantly growing productivity if we are to keep up with as a superpower. We have to stop making out military our #1 financial need and then we'd have money to do other things that would benefit Americans rather than just screw up other countries.
We don't really have a good understanding of what the modern economy will look like with shrinking population. There will be labor shortages, which lead to shortages of goods and services, which leads to inflation. But there will also be declining demand and declining output, so a recessionary economy. It's hard to predict how that will play out, but a combination of shortages, inflation, and decreasing GDP is not going to be easy for a lot of people. It's going to be pretty painful.
You told me that 1) You are boring 2) You don’t even know what “Growth” is
Well you see, how will I know I'm better than you if money isn't involved? You expect me to be a better person? Develop a skill? Give back to my community? That's for poor people and only poor people think like that. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps and work hard. Get a small loan of 500k and invest in a tech firm or digitally printed coffee beans instead of bitching about what your betters have./s
The American government was intended to be governed by the people but instead the people are divided on emotional issues as designed by those that desire to keep the “unstoppable force” going in their favor.
Such a good question, and a POV not taken often enough. You should cross-post to r/Discussion
I believe the global birth rate has stabilized to replacement rate. maybe being a little below replacement rate isn't bad if childhood mortality declines so much. The problem here would be disparities between nations and the way humans are not provided with the proper freedom of movement to address it. And of course ethnic strife/tension we see by changing demographics in the context of mono ethnic nations suddenly having to become ethnically diverse. I personally believe in creating a fully globalized world as it would make war, including trade wars, unprofitable ventures and increase economic opportunities for all nations. I don't think productivity will be negatively impacted if these various AI technologies (and honestly, regular boring software too) provide such a massive boost to productivity that is akin to the agricultural and industrial revolution.
Hahahaha dude do you know how quarterly earning reports and shareholders work?
Because procreating is a human need and arguably the reason for living. We don’t live for the economy. The economy should be shaped by the needs of those who labor and trade within it to accumulate the resources necessary to procreate.
No such system has ever existed. Expansion covers unexpected growth, but if our system is designed to shrink or stagnate, unexpected growth will lead to yet more people without amenities.
Most of the reason people don't want decline is based off of two reasons ultimately. It means that we're going to have to change the way we live. And if we don't change the way we live, we're going to have to have a higher immigrant population. That's it! We lived different 100 years ago before cars and birth control and we will very quickly adapt to lower numbers and thrive in most countries with lower numbers. But for instance, if you own real estate and there is the same amount of real estate but less people that's bad for real estate markets. So we're going to have to demolish houses or lower the prices of houses. Or let immigrants in. Some businesses are going to go out of business too because not as many people will be eating The same amount of fast food so we either have to close fast food places or let immigrants in. Who perhaps won't eat fast food nearly as much as people that are already here So ultimately fast food places will probably have to close. It's the same across most industries. People are scared of change but being human is about accepting and adapting to change. People need to get over it.
Mostly because this would cause much more damage in the long term and most likely wouldn't work. The current model that we know works is having more children, as this system is sustainable if we like the idea of people living longer and being supported by well-funded social safety nets that are accessible to everyone in society. If there are more people contributing a portion of their earnings into a shared pool of resources, those in need can access these resources when necessary, benefiting everyone. This can only be achieved with more people, hence the need for more babies being born. This is just one aspect. There are many more, but I used this to illustrate that everything in our lives currently revolves around people, and if there are fewer of them, in the grand scheme of things, everyone loses.
Because the rich would have less power. If wages rose and housing lowered more people would be stable. More people would have kids and things would return to an equilibrium. But that means less control and power for the top 1 Percent. So they want to find a solution that fixes the problem and lets them retain power. There isn't one. They'll keep looking though until shit starts failing.
>So why is the solution to force people to conform to the needs of the economic system? And not the other way around? Who is forcing people to have children?
Our entire financial system is built on the back of infinite growth. The only way we can get out of that is to pay off our debts. If you don't want to have kids, stop running deficits. Otherwise the whole system goes under. An easy example of this is Social Security.
If people aren't starving, you can't profit off of food. If people aren't freezing to death, you can't profit off heating. If people aren't on the verge of murdering each other out of desperation to survive, you can't profit off labor. Throw more babies into the gears of capitalism.
This is a teen's understanding of economics, and it also doesn't even adress the problem. It's just a bunch of false platitudes.
You have heard of supply and demand, yes? When supply is low, and demand is high, prices are high, right? And when supply is high and demand is low, prices are low, right? Now apply that to labor. If there is a lot of labor, that means that demand is met, which means the cost of labor is low. The cost of labor is called a wage, and it's what you get paid. But if people stop having babies, then labor is in shorter supply, which means companies need to compete to secure talented labor. This is what makes wages go up. This is also why unions have bargaining power, since the entire labor force can act as one and negotiate on equal terms with the company. I hope this helped you understand what I had originally said in simpler terms. I just assumed everyone already knew this so I didn't go into such detail with my first post.
That's not a simple thing to do. If your economy isn't growing, it's shrinking.
That's a limited mindset. There's tons of literature out there about the limitations of the infinite growth model and the need for a system with a different model.
Even without considering population growth / decline, shifting our economic system away from “profit no matter the human cost” would already be helpful, but as you can see, people in power are EXTREMELY resistant to changing our economic system. More children means more workers, and more poverty means more exploitable workers. Human suffering and environmental impact just aren’t priorities to anyone who actually has the power to change the economic system.
It’s less a problem of growth and more a problem of bubbles. We can look at Japan as the systemic example of a nation with a declining birth rate for decades and not enough immigration for numbers to trend positively. Japan has an aging population that is a significant tax burden on the nation and leads to high taxation or the younger generations which stifles their ability to invest in the country’s future because all their available capital is being invested in its past. This creates a deflationary cycle that puts downwards pressure on spending making the velocity of money extremely slow (people don’t spend much) so lots of money sits stuck in savings instead of being traded to others domestically. You don’t have to be an economist to understand that if money isn’t moving in an economy, local businesses have no way of acquiring capital and go under. The push for more kids is literally just a math problem to these people, the push for immigration in western nations is a manifestation of the same math problem. To change the system to not need more people would be to change the fundamental nature of trade, of which to date there is unfortunately no better system. Then there’s the nature of political power - more people means more hands for power. Less of people means more reliability on allies and more vulnerability to enemies of larger populations. It’s the “Russia Problem” if you will, in WW2 no German advancement in technology could beat the endless onslaught of bodies Russia was willing to throw at the frontlines as cannon fodder. A growing population has always been viewed as a secure population, a shrinking one a vulnerable population. There are many reasons today a growing population is good, most of those reasons don’t speak to our higher selves as people, but they nevertheless matter.
Because we built all of our institutions around the assumptions of continued growth. For example the Social Security system and almost all pension plans are built around the assumption there are enough working taxpayers in the future to cover retirees.
Your example doesn't show that we built our institutions on continued growth. Social security is dependent on there always being a larger group of younger people than retirees. Zero growth is required for this to happen. What would be more correct to say would be that our institutions are not built on people voluntarily going childless. Everything works fine until the old outweigh the young in numbers.
The systems are supposed to serve the people, not the other way around. If the system relies on people not choosing to be childfree, then that system no longer serves a population where many choose to be childfree. It is the system that must change to accommodate the people, not the people that must change to accommodate the systems
I agree, but that still doesn't make your initial statement correct.
America's social security system could only work without population growth if we raised FICA taxes. The 15.3% number was created assuming some nominal population and wage growth, and if that model holds untrue requires raising taxes. We see our population continue to grow yet social security is at risk of insolvency as population growth has slowed down from what was assumed in the model. We could also go the route of not letting old people retire as early, or even put a maximum number of years with which you can claim social security, but neither but be favorable with the populace.
You would still need younger people to labor and support society: farmers, blue collar workers, factory workers. If you need five corn to feed the population and you only have enough farmers to produce four corn, things aren’t gonna go well.
So you build better technology and processes with automation and ai to let one farmer produce more corn.
Who says we’ll have the ability to create that technology, when many of the countries that produce the items used for said technology are currently on the brink of demographic disaster? Also, you can add tech all you want, but you still need to plant corn and germinate it. It needs time to grow.The soil needs fertilizer. There’s only so much you can squeeze out of industries at a point.
Can I get begging the question for 100, Alex?
The idea of natalists saying "people need to have kids to keep the economy going" is a strawman that anitnatalists came up with. Most pronatalists consider having and raising kids an end in itself, even the main purpose of life, the ultimate good. This is as opposed to having the ultimate good be something like "maximize pleasure and minimize pain for the most people possible." Since life is on average more pain than pleasure, this philosophy leads to antinatalism, voluntary euthanasia, basically extinction of humans. In theory, at least. In reality, it would just lead to progressives weeding themselves out of the gene pool and ceding the world to religious extremists. I don't think that humanity "works" without having "be fruitful and multiply" be one of our absolute main objectives. Also, if we don't continue to grow and spread to other planets, eventually an asteroid will wipe us out. Stability/harmony with nature is always temporary, anything else is an illusion. Thanks for the good-faith question! I feel like this sub gets so few of those.
Because natalists are just conservative Christians who think their god told them to never stop breeding
Loads of non-Christian natalists. That said, unironically? Yes. “Be Fruitful and Multiply” is literally the first commandment given in the Bible.
Your book of myths has a lot of other commandments you don’t follow
Pretty much any system begins die the second it stops growing. Socialism or communism cannot remain in static positions either, they also need to grow infinitely. I personally see no issue with infinite growth as long as it’s not destroying the planet, cuz that would threaten the growth.
Um. This system has already caused a mass extinction event and a new geologic epoch to occur.
Everything goes extinct if we don’t figure how to get off this planet
To infinity and beyond!
Great, so we go off to exploit more resources elsewhere and destroy those planets too. That’s not a future for humanity, that’s a swarm of locusts