Everybody knows what needs to be done. Parenthood needs to be sustainable for the parents. There’s just no political will to implement a policy that will only start paying off in 20+ years. Every politician kicks the can down the road, or implements half-hearted policies.
Edit: Just realised I posted this to the wrong instance comm 😅
Alternative approach: let the population decline so we have more natural resources per person
We have no real shortage of natural resources, the problem lies with equitable distribution of said resources.
At this rate we might run out tho
Of what? The general issue is mismanagement and unsustainable usage of resources. If we’re sustainable, it doesn’t matter how big the population is. If we’re unsustainable, we’ll run out anyway and it’s just a matter of time.
You go ahead and convince Trump to not “drill baby drill”. There’s more to having enough resources than the theoretical optimal usage. There’s also real world usage
You’re making the assumption that with less population, they won’t be able to mess up the environment. I personally find that assumption extremely dubious. There’s no limit on idiocy. Short of us losing technology, it’s a great force and idiocy multiplier.
Can you not put words in my mouth? We’ll run out of non-renewables eventually. Lets have that in a 1000 years and not a 100 please
Unsustainability is unsustainability. Does it matter if we run out in 100 years or 1000? The goal should be to go sustainable, and that is actually MORE likely to happen with a larger population base, as sustainable tech requires a higher tech base, and consequently a larger population base to support it.
The issue is not the lower fertility rate itself. The issue is
- capitalism assuming the impossible - infinite pop growth
- governments with a tribal mindset trying to outcompete each other in number of heads, so they force their populations to murder or subjugate each other
Infinite growth is absolutely possible as long as it’s combined with regular terrifying contraction and reduction; When growth slows down, engineer genocide until there’s plenty of room to grow. It’s a long embraced human tradition.
mmm bring on that malthusian magic
I think that globalised megacorporations make this sort of chainsaw growth less feasible over time, since you can’t extract surplus value from dead people. That wasn’t a big deal before because corporations were mostly restricted by country/government, but now they’re basically everywhere.
[inb4: this does NOT mean that globalised megacorporations are against genocide. Far from that - it’s just that they’d rather order their governments to engage in genocide in other situations. Such as megacorpo turf wars.]
Time for Big Grave to get a piece of the pie
Now to harvest all data and materials out of dead bodies for max-profit.
Multiple post-mortem scans to identify lifestyle parameters and extrapolate to get past buying habits and predict future generation’s buying trends.
Then extract longer living organs and bones for use in hyper-processed products. Leave the skin, so that taxidermists can then charge a premium from the relatives to make the “body” look like a real dead person’s body before public incineration or embalming and engraving.
Then research zombification …
>When Big Data meets horror movies
There’s a fundamental disconnect between people who live in highly developed nations and their awareness of how much populations from intentionally underdeveloped nations are subsidizing their ability to accrue material wealth. I believe this creates a scenario where the only way to continue maintaining the high living standards the West has known for 50+ years without incurring increasing costs is through the manipulative create of underclasses that allow capital accumulation to occur. Unfortunately now that globalization is out of fashion, many governments are shifting to bringing these underclasses much closer to home, which is adding to the resulting anti-immigrant, xenophobic political discourse we’re now seeing. Population growth could mostly be a flash in the pan, but if countries really do start shutting the door on immigration and have to also contend with collapsing fertility rates you can bet they’re gonna start rationalizing how to strip women’s rights away; have to keep the underclass there to feed the billionaires and scare the workers.
A gentle drop in fertility rate is preferable to steady growth until there’s a crisis triggering a population crash. Check out this crazy ass line:
Keeping our society stable and happy while the economic system adjusts may be tough.
I agree, but based on current trends there’s nothing gentle about the coming decline. Some countries are going to see their populations drop by more than half within decades
Everybody knows what needs to be done.
I’m not convinced it’s as simple as you make it out to be, as places that experience more poverty and violence appear to have higher fertility rates (1).
- In places with poverty and violence, kids are an asset. They work and contribute to the family in times of crisis.
- General lack of education, awareness and access to birth control means there are no options for women.
- Women have fewer or no rights, and little to no say in whether they have kids.
Unless we’re planning on this route (which it seems the US is set on), the alternative is to make parenthood attractive (or at least not-unattractive) enough to negate the costs.
Additionally, fertility rates are dropping worldwide, even in low-income countries. They’re further back on the curve, but they’re definitely moving along it. Some institutes claim we’ve already dropped below the global replacement rate of ~2.3, though it’ll take a few years to confirm the current statistics.
- Poverty and violence also increase the likelihood of losing children, so people have more in case.
That reminds me my grandma. My family is not exactly wealthy, even for Latin American standards; and even in times where women were not supposed to work, my grandpa was doing grunt work while grandma worked as a hotel maid.
And as I was getting older, I often visited my grandma. Drink some yerba together, chitchat, smoke some cigs together, this kind of stuff. And she told me some shitty stories about my mum and her three siblings when they were kids. In plenty of those, one of the four muppets almost died. (Including my mum. Hoooooly fuck - eating berries known locally as “horse destroyer”, rolling inside a tire into a high traffic road, perhaps she likes cats so much because she identifies herself with them, they both have nine lives?)
Well. Turns out that they weren’t supposed to be four children, but six. My mum wasn’t the oldest one - her two older brothers died before she was born. My grandma once mentioned that once, but in no moment she showed a change in expression; it was a fact of life.
Even as a man I could not picture myself being so stoic. If I had a child and they died, I’d probably lose my marbles.
It first came to my attention in a book - The Poisionwood Bible - about missionaries into Africa.
And fwiw, my friend with four healthy children has also had nine miscarriages. Nine!
You forget that most of the assholes in charge right now don’t give a flying fuck about fertility rates, having an educated workforce, or even anyone’s rights and opportunities. All that matters to them is making more money and hanging onto power. The fuckers can practically read the future as long there is a dollar sign in front of it, and as far as they are concerned, the rest of us don’t factor into that future.
I believe some of the rich assholes really do see birth rates as a sort of global crisis. Mostly because it poses a threat to their bottom line. Less workers = less labor to exploit, less consumers to buy their shit, pay subscriptions or blast with ads. And a demographic shift where the size of the older generation is greater than the younger generation massively screws up social security systems that depend on taxes from the young to pay the benefits for the old. And, more nefariously - because parents necessarily consume more and become more reliable workers: when you’re living paycheck to paycheck you can’t afford to quit, take unpaid leave, turn up overtime or go on strike. But perhaps too, some may be experiencing the existential crisis that there is a real, natural limit to the growth of the human race, that we are not god-destined to just expand forever and ever, but rather finite in our place in the cosmos.
Many are concerned. Capitalism requires a growing population. It is just they seem to believe force is the way to go.
Capitalism requires a growing population.
How so?
Capitalism requires a growing population.
How so?
Sloppy/oversimplified explanation:
In capitalism, each business is trying to maximise its own margin of profit. And to do so, it needs to produce more for a cheaper production price, and sell it.
Technology makes each worker output more production, but it also makes their labour more expensive. So to produce more, better tech is not enough; you need more workers.
And to sell more of your production, you need more people buying your stuff, because there’s a limit on how much each will buy.
This means each business needs an increasingly larger number of workers and customers. At the start they could do it by venturing into other countries, and killing local businesses; but eventually you reach a point where you have megacorporations like Unilever, Google, Faecesbook*, Nestlé etc. Where do they expand into? Where do they get more customers and workers from?
*call me childish, I can’t help but misspell it.
Isn’t that a bit like argueing that a bathtub needs to increase in size every time you take a bath, as you add water?
In other words, it’s ignoring a whole part of the bath: the drain.
In the same way it’s ignoring a whole part of capitalism: bankrupcies and other forms of debt foregiveness. As some businesses become irrelevant, and as new ones are started.
Bankruptcy is a mostly a risk for small and nascent businesses: raw material is more expensive, economy of scale works against them, they start out with less know-how, they have a smaller reserve of capital to handle eventualities, banks are less eager to give them loans, so goes on. Eventually they get outcompeted by another business, often a considerably larger one, that keeps growing.
So the analogy with a bathtub full of water doesn’t work well. It’s more like a box full of balloons; except those balloons keep growing, and the bigger balloons are actually harder to pop than the smaller ones. Eventually the pressure forces a few small balloons to pop, but as soon as they do the bigger ones take the space over. And they keep exerting pressure over the box. [Sorry for the weird analogy.]
For a really bad summary? Capitalism requires economic growth, business, industry, etc. must increase output, therefore the consumer base must increase, and so it goes with the true labor underclass. For a real explanation check the link below to a PDF file of a dissertation on the subject.
https://scholars.unh.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1462&context=dissertation
That dissertation does not explain why capitalism requires population growth.
Rather it takes “capitalism requires positive economic growth” as an axiom, to argue that such growth can not persist.
Yes, and growth is sustained by striking a balance of quality and quantity in terms of the human population. If this balance becomes out of whack you will decline into what they refer to as “malthusian stagnation”. So the population does need to grow in order to sustain economic growth, along with the quality of the individuals that make up the population. What they refer to as “economic darwinism” beings to truly take place as a population has the extra resources to put more into children than parent, creating generational progress. Post industrial economic darwinism gets a buffer, so-to-speak, due to the increased per capita productivity introduced by technology. However this is also not infinite, and so, at some point this will plateau, and the population will need to begin rising again to spur growth. We are likely in the midst of this plateauing.
I didn’t forget it, that is one of the main reasons why there’s no political will.
Israel has high fertility.
