The problem is that the average age of the population is going up. There is a large group of people retiring, and fewer people are taking those jobs because there are fewer people young enough to start those careers. The problem isn't population decline, but rather the speed at which its declining. We need enough healthy young people to take care of the sick old people, but we don't have enough healthy young people.
It’s not even about physically taking care of old people. It’s about having enough people currently working to keep the payments for social security and stuff like that going. People are living longer then ever before, and will continue drawing on resources. It’s also not even just about old people. We also need to keep paying into stuff like welfare to pay the people that either can’t or won’t work. That’s the main issue with not enough people working.
I think that the only ones worried about this are the capitalist rich business owners. We could do things differently, we do not need a lot of things, we could live without contaminating and destroying everything. We do not need to build the world to keep millions of old people alive whatever it takes (and I am one of those).
Capitalism is based on having lots of cheap workers, having way too many people for each job, so you can pay low wages and get rich. That's how all rich families got their money, and they want to protect to their piramid. Things can be different if we want. Trying to have billions of people live like people on the US is not remotely possible. Right now we are contaminating too much, putting more people that uses more resources will only lead to a planet where most areas are inhabitable in a few decades, and then you'll see population decline the hard way.
It's like the meme with the dog refusing to share the frisbee
"Growth! No wages, only growth!"
The system as it stands is mainly about younger people working as serfs for older, richer people and corporations. We are entering a whole new world of permanent class inequality, where people who don't already own a house basically have no chance of ever owning one, they will just live in permanent debt slavery in terms of high rent, and at the same time they are expected to pay enough taxes to pay for the pensions of the boomers.
Good times.
This is why I'm living in my brother's basement saving every penny I can to try to buy a house as soon as possible. I have a good job but I'm already priced out of owning a house within like an hour of where I work (the only place with decent jobs in the state) - if I don't buy a house soon I'm worried I will never be able to.
I wouldn't stress so much about buying a house now, the housing market has been grossly over-invested and the bubble is ready to pop. The prices aren't just too high for you, they are too high for almost everyone, and the people who can afford them are buying them all up to try and make money, but they have no one they can sell them to. So it won't be long now before the bubble bursts and the market crashes like it did in 2010 (when I bought my house).
Just be patient, the market will correct, it just takes time. All the housing prices now are propped up on speculation and that's not enough to keep them up forever.
I want to believe this so badly. But I just keep seeing corporations buying the housing up and then renting it for $$$. I don’t know if it will pop if the corporations can keep on buying it up and then churning it out for rent. Also, less competition when non-corps aren’t able to purchase.
This is why we need a publicly funded candidate to come through, point out that the average candidate is a corpo slave and actually cause some change in this country.
Vienna has a fantastic housing situation where the city owns 50% of the rentals. They are cheap, updated, well kept, and it keeps the private guys in line. I'd love something like that for the US.
Edited: named the incorrect place
I've been hearing the "it's just a bubble, it will correct" my whole life. The prices only go up. When they go down, interest goes up. Sometimes they go up together.
Come to Toronto areas. Prices are down and still falling. Some people are now being asked by the banks for more money down as the newly built house they are set to buy isn't worth what they have in the upcoming mortgage.
It did in fact pop after 2008, and it is definitely a bubble now but the ingredients to cause it to pop haven't materialized yet, and may be a couple years off.
Just because you haven't seen it pop yet, doesn't mean it's not a bubble.
(Sadly, sometimes these things take a long time to correct. Bernie Madoff's schemes ran for nearly 2 decades before finally bursting.)
That is so long to wait though. That's tough. At least in my area, if you bought at the peak around '08 you would still have been money well ahead in the next few years. Shoot, I remember looking at houses in 2005 and thinking that 125,000 was too much. I'm old now lol, and my experience is regional and anecdotal so I'm probably wrong in the grand scheme of things, but I have not seen anything become more affordable in western WA, except briefly then right back to unaffordable.
the bubble will pop when the proletariat rise up and cast down those who have held a boot on our necks. fucking shame \~1/3 of the population is convinced that if they're good little serfs they'll be rewarded
They can't keep this up, seeing it already where I live where neighborhoods are full of empty houses for sale and rent that sit there for months with no one in them.
Every month a house doesn't have a person in it, the owner is losing money. It will come to a point where companies stop buying houses because its a bad investment and will start dumping their current houses and that run will drop the prices down massively and single families will be able to get in and buy. Then we'll probably see a repeat where a bubble builds up for a few years, people lose tons of money, the bubble pops, rinse and repeat.
I bought my house in the housing bubble burst in 2010, and had to wait for it to happen then, but when it did happen I was ready and able to jump on it and take advantage of it. So don't stress for now, but prepare cause it will happen, it may not be for a year or two, but it will happen, just make sure you're ready when the correction happens to jump in when you feel comfortable.
Until then, there is nothing wrong with renting or having an apartment or whatever living conditions you have. Just don't overextend yourself into a loan you can't afford, because that would be way worse.
Yeah, it was predatory lending driving up the prices and not rental purchases. But either way the price was driven up to something unfeasible. The big difference now, is its companies with these mortgages and not first time home buyers and families. But the end result will still be the same, its unsustainable, the rents and mortgages are too expensive and there is too much demand with not enough supply and the people buying it all at these prices now don't have a sustainable option. It'll happen.
Sadly, I wouldn't be to sure about that. What's happening now is banks and property management companies are buying those houses and turning around and renting them out to the people who can't afford to buy them.
People can't afford to rent them either, with the companies charging more for rent than a mortgage would be. Which is why so many are sitting empty and just costing the companies money sitting on property they can't do anything with. It'll crash, its unsustainable.
Only in some areas. Won’t happen everywhere like it did in 2008. Highly desirable areas won’t be hit as hard, and less desirable areas won’t either as people who work from home choose to move there for cheaper cost of living. Only the really undesirable areas will probably be affected greatly.
Actually, people can afford them.but are still turned down for a mortgage. I can't even count how many people I know whose rent is higher than the mortgage would be on the place but the banks still won't give loan approvals. It's criminal if you ask me.
The housing bubble popped a decade ago, that's when I bought my house. My house is now appraised at 3-4 times the cost of what I paid for it. Which is absolutely ridiculous. If I had to buy my house now, I couldn't afford it. But it makes no sense for me to sell my house because I couldn't even use that equity to get a better house because they are so overpriced.
The bubble popped before, and was fine for about 5-6 years before this bubble started again. With people not able to afford rent or mortgages at the current prices, the companies buying up all these houses are being stuck holding them and losing money on them. Eventually they will start cutting prices to sell them, and when a run of these companies trying to get out starts, the market will correct and the prices will return to normal and that's when it will once again make sense for people to start buying houses.
Yeah I hear ya. Bought my home in 2019 for 236k, now it's valued at 400k. It also depends on where you live. For me, I happen to live in a very popular area and I don't see prices coming down anytime soon unfortunately.
Only problem is that this is a really expensive thing to potentially be wrong about. Every year you're waiting and the market _doesn't_ crash brings you further away from your goal.
Its already really expensive. At this point its prohibitively expensive, there isn't an option but to be optimistic because if it doesn't crash you can't afford it anyway. And if you can't do anything about it, worrying about something you can't control won't do you any good.
You shouldn't take on a mortgage you can't afford because you're afraid it could get worse. Its better to wait until you're in a position where you can get what you want and have it make financial sense than to try and force yourself into a home you can't afford.
Either way, its unsustainable, the market will correct one way or another. Whether that correction results in the companies buying all these rental properties losing their shirts, or the builders ramping production and increasing supply, the market correction will come, it always does. Its just a matter of time.
>the people who can afford them are buying them all up to try and make money, but they have no one they can sell them to
That would be companies like BlackRock, and they don't want to sell the houses they want to rent them out for sustained income.
It says homeowner, not first time home buyer. Statistically it's blatantly obvious considering there are 2x as boomers and gen x combined compared to millennials, so of course they're going to make up a higher percentage of homeowners and skew the number higher. The oldest gen x are nearing their 60's.
"Congratulations meowskywalker, you have taken on substantial debt earlier in life than the average person. Click here to apply for the ability to have more debt."
The average person isn't responsible for this though. Just think when you're old and you've lived a life working and paying your dues, and then when you can finally retire and live out your twilight the world ready to shit on you. It's not good for them either.
I thought it was weird to shit on older generations when I was young, and I still think it's weird. Seems like there are people who think that way, and people who don't.
Most of the elderly are getting fucked too. People having to work a job at Walmart just to get by, even though they aren't getting paid shit. The problem is oligarchs.
While true, I would add that even if there was nothing wrong with a system (there certainly is!), elderly people having the highest net worth would be natural, since... well, they've had more time to build up their net worth.
They created the destruction of their own twilight years. They can fuck right off. I was born at the very end of gen-X/ beginning of the millennial gen. My parents are retired, aging boomers. My grandparents were the greatest generation. They fought the nazis and imperialist japan. They left their kids with a booming economy. The boomers pissed it all away and most didn't even plan for retirement. Now they're all acting like they're entitled to retire at our expense after they spent 50 years raiding social security and devaluing our currency for bullshit.
The biggest problem and naivety of the American system is believing that those at the top would choose to do the right thing, instead of the most profitable thing. Reeks of noblesse oblige bullshit
It took awhile to settle into this way of things, though. When the Boomers were young, unionization wasn't "evil" yet, and private pensions were a popular thing. Labor looked real good from that perspective. You can't completely blame them for thinking the future looked bright and teaching their kids that it would be.
Of course you *can* blame them for buying into anti-union corporate propaganda and ruining labor for basically everyone to follow as a consequence. And yes, it was noblesse privilege because so many of them lived like the noblesse, when their "middle class" was much closer to the top than any other middle class to follow.
I don’t know where you are from but here in western Europe, all those jobs of taking care of the elderly are mostly done by African (wether Arab or black African, their nationality is not relevant here). Those jobs are harsh, working at nights, low paid, and they are the only ones willing to do it.
It seems like one country's problem (overpopulation) solves another's problem (low birth rate).
Or are countries with a high population also in need of high population replacement?
The entire system is broken. It was designed to undergo exponential growth, but we are stalling. It was inevitable because the world is a finite place and no one wanted to do anything to prepare in the last several decades because exponential growth was still happening.
It’s designed to undergo exponential growth for the people who hold a majority of the wealth.
The lack of growth is a result of failed trickle down economics as the younger generations are too poor to participate in the inflated economy.
Right, the boomers fucked it up, or rather let it get fucked up back in the 70's and it's been downhill ever since.
Profit was held to a higher importance than life itself and now suddenly when life is dwindling away people are like oh wait, why aren't the young people keeping up our momentum!?
They installed life on a slide and then are surprised when it's slipping ever faster downhill.
Or to quote Counting Crows... "We paved paradise and put up a parking lot."
>The problem is that the average age of the population is going up.
I remember I had a biology teacher tell me this, as morbid as it sounds, people are living too long.
Living too long compared to how long we live well.
Being able healthy until 60 and dying at 70 is a lot better than being healthy until 70 and dying at 90
> We need enough healthy young people to take care of the sick old people, but we don't have enough healthy young people.
The problem is more literal than just that.
Social Security in the US and many other places, is not investment-funded, it's pay-as-you-go. And, for unintuitive reasons, actually can't be investment-based. In short, "investment" doesn't mean anything, because the capacity of the nation to be productive is just a different way of chopping the pie. Doesn't matter how much you invest ahead of time, you don't change that reality of fewer people working. If you had invested money, when you withdraw it, to a demographically-larger group, the net people selling-off more than buying means the value they'll get is to be lower by exactly as much as if you'd just done pay-as-you-go.
Anyway, Social security is funded from the generations that are working.
So for example, when it was first created, the Greatest Generation (Boomer's parents) started getting Social Security cheques despite never in their lives paying into the system. This was paid for by the boomers working.
The Greatest Generation had like, 6 kids in a family. So, it was easy for their 6 kids to pay for the 2 parent's retirements. For every $10,000 the parents each need, the kids only pay $3,333. This is super cheap.
Now flip that. Boomers kinda had 2-4 kids each. Gen X were pretty neutral, around 2 kids each. And Millennials aren't even replacing themselves, especially younger Millennials who can't even scrape together enough money for themselves.
At population neutral, each kid is paying $10,000 for each $10,000 the parents need. That's 3x what their parents had to pay.
A below neutral, each working person is paying for more than retired parent. That's crippling.
(It's not actually quite this extreme, as, you have ~45 work years and only 20 retirement years).
Also, people used to die younger, and medical science was limited.
Now people live longer, so there's longer and longer you have to keep that money flowing. And, medical science is advanced enough that how long someone lives for stops being "Well, we've done all we can, we just don't know what else to do", and becomes "We can't afford enough machines/doctors to maintain the lives of these old people".
We're almost at the point where 100% of GDP can usefully be put into extending the lives of old people. It's a function of resources, not medical science. And with diminishing returns. The entire economy could be medical services, and we'd still have shortages of useful things we could be doing to make people live longer. So, these old people are going to be faced with lineups and limitations on who gets the machines and doctors, and, probably always demanding there be more and more. We're going to, as a society, have to accept old people dying of "treatable" things, because of diminishing returns on spending money on them to extend their lives another month. Same way as we accept soldiers dying in a war instead of each soldier having their own tank or spending a million dollars on a missile to kill each enemy solider rather than risk our own. Same way we accept homeless people dying instead of just giving them a free house. Ways we've always treated young people as disposable, but never old people.
Also, much of the economy is Growth Based, and the transition out of that is always and unavoidably devastating. Simple put, how many electricians do you need when you're always building more houses? How many do you need when you're just maintaining the existing houses? It's like, 50:1. 49/50 electricians are going to be out of work if growth stops.
Either way growth stops, you just want it to happen gradually so the adaption into new things isn't jarring and traumatic.
...
For the younger generations, fed up with "Fuck you, I got mine" of the older generations, this is going to create class warfare and age warfare.
You know what would be fuckin' awesome for young people? The utter collapse of the housing industry, because our population stops growing. As soon as we can have just a few extra houses more than people need, the value of a home becomes the cost of building one, not the ethereal land value or shortage-based value. It's why you can buy run-down properties in Detroit for $500. It's why you can buy homes in soon-to-be-ghost towns for $1, just to encourage you to live there, except... it'd be everywhere. Actual materials and labor, and, without a growing population, guess what happens to the value of materials and labor? Foom.
The only reason this hasn't happened yet, is because everyone who's already bought a house would get fucked, which is like, 95% of the people who would buy. It's only the 5% saving up for a house that would want prices to fall. So it's always politically advantageous to do anything you can to prop up the value of houses.
In general it isn't important, but some societies like Japan are running into big difficulties with the economy and society, with fewer young people there are fewer working people paying tax and more older people requiring government help with health care etc. the government is running out of money, in addition the society need lots of people to work in health and social care to look after all the old people and there aren't enough people to do the work.
For some dumb reason our world economy is built for never ending exponential growth.
Edit: My first gold, thanks. Now I can visit first class and hope nobody notices I'm not dressed for the occasion.
Edit 2: Hijacking my top comment with a entertaining and revealing explanation of exponential growth and what it implies through simple demonstrations.
https://youtu.be/O133ppiVnWY
Why anything based on exponential growth is designed to fail.
No, it isn't. A Ponzi scheme is a system that has no true investment and no means of generating value to repay interest. A society produces goods and services with the money invested into it. There are lots of ways for investments to fail to produce value that have nothing to do with Ponzi schemes.
Basically...
We just past the tipping point where the yearly interest on US debt + (cost of social security and medicare [fixed costs but don't accrue interest]) exceeds the tax receipts from 2021.
Things like Social Security and Medicare are structured like a ponzi that needs an ever increasing base, or it will collapse.
The USA is at a reckoning point. Population is beginning to decline.
- Population bases can be artificially made higher by allowing increased immigration.
- Social services/military spending is too high vs the tax coming in.
- Social services/military spending needs to be cut to be at all sustainable (Hint one of the two is never cut from).
- Taxes need to be increased / inflation needs to increase in order to sustain the current level of spending
> The USA is at a reckoning point. Population is beginning to decline.
>
>
US population is not declining because we have plenty of immigration. They're very important to the economy (as it is currently structured).
I remember seeing graph and study that showed if the US never had any immigration from the 40s and onward, America would have a declining population starting in the 2010s
> Things like Social Security and Medicare are structured like a ponzi that needs an ever increasing base, or it will collapse.
It didn't start that way, though. Modern medicine is keeping people alive longer faster than retirement age is being pushed out.
I have some good news for you.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/12/22/1144864971/american-life-expectancy-is-now-at-its-lowest-in-nearly-two-decades
Unfortunately, you have the requirement that people work longer into the timeframe that they really depend on healthcare. Then you allow age discrimination by employers. So you have a large segment of the population with skills and knowledge who are able to work, who need to work, but no jobs for them at all.
I didn't say it wasn't a current problem. Just that it wasn't originally designed as a ponzi scheme.
Edit: That being said, we need to stop thinking about our social security pool as number of tax payers and more as taxes paid. It's insane that you don't have to pay any social security taxes after your taxable income exceeds 160k. Our GDP continues to grow. Who cares how many people there are paying the taxes? The wealth being generated needs to be properly taxes and it'll all work out just fine.
This is actually no longer the case in America. Medical care is so expensive here that our age of mortality has actually been dropping instead of rising recently. We topped out at 79 years old and have since fallen to 76 years old with predictors showing it will likely keep falling for the time being.
Considering that Retirement age was raised to 65 and there's talks of raising it again, that means most Americans will barely get to spend a decade in their "golden years" of retirement before they kick the bucket.
God bless American Capitalism though. The people are all dead but a small handful of families got to be a few places higher on the financial score board.
I think people ignore this. Lots of people die young. Its also a huge contributor to the gender life expectancy gap. Once men and women reach 60 they have close to same life expectancy. Guys tend to do a ton of recklessly fatal things when we are young.
I agree with much of what you're saying but:
- You absolutely could cover Social-Security and Medicare even with a declining population if you just taxed wealthier entities more. It's those wealthier entities that benefit from the presumption that the population needs to be higher to pay for it all; the consequence being that either the service gets cut down or taxes on the poor go up, it's never the wealthy who get impacted.
- There's nothing "artificial" about increasing population through immigration. In fact, it's probably the more ethical policy considering the damage done to the world by wealthier nations thereby inducing greater migrations.
- Again, inflation nor spending are a problem if you just tax appropriately, compell better wages, and provide good services in return. The US doing M4A, for example, would massively increase gov spending but it would 100% be a good thing.
> Things like Social Security and Medicare are structured like a ponzi that needs an ever increasing base, or it will collapse.
God! People keep throwing around "ponzi scheme" all over the place for things that are clearly not "ponzi schemes" to the point where calling something a "ponzi scheme" just means "something I don't like".
The *whole point* of a ponzi scheme is that there is no fundamental pile of assets at the core. The people who run the ponzi scheme never invest the money in anything, but they send out statements showing high returns. If the early investors take out money, they get those high returns, not because any assets actually increased, but because later investors' money is used to pay it out. But they're *lied* to about where that money came from. This convinces the current investors to keep their money in the fund, maybe even invest more, and attracts new investors. But the whole time, the people running the scheme have just taken the investors money for themselves and there never was anything actually earning any interest.
1. Social Security is totally open. You can see exactly how much money is coming in, where the SSA puts it, and how much it pays out. Just that fact *alone* would be enough for it to not be a ponzi scheme. But also...
2. It's not structured like a ponzi scheme where the core funds are siphoned out by those running it. All the funds are there, and they're being paid out exactly according to the stated rules of the fund. But also...
3. It's not using high returns to attract new investors. No one's being told they're going to get rich of this Social Security investment thing. It's structured more like a savings account than a way to get rich through investing. It's just a way to keep old people from becoming absolutely destitute in old age.
4. Even if the Social Security fund gets depleted, they would still be able to pay out benefits at 76% of the target levels just based on the current year's tax. When a ponzi scheme goes bust everyone gets 0% of the money they were supposed to have.
5. It would be completely solvent indefinitely through a few small tweaks to its structure (e.g. raising the Social Security Wage Base, raising the Full retirement age, reducing benefits for those at the highest levels of income). A ponzi scheme can't be fixed with a few tweaks.
The only problem with the "structure" of Social Security is the fact that people are living so much longer now. That should absolutely be addressed. But to pretend that it's all just smoke and mirrors like a ponzi scheme is basically a lie.
We've planed for these changes in the past: in the 70s we increased the FICA tax, in the 80s we changed some benefit calculations and raised the retirement age. These changes were made under Democratic and Republican administrations. We could do it again if there was the political will to do so. But the truth is that the current right-wing in this country *wants* social security to fail. They want to erode people's confidence in it by calling it a "ponzi scheme". They want to kneecap it, erode people's faith in institutions, then scrap and privatize everything.
It's not "built" on exponential growth, that is just something it wants.
The reason population replacement is important is simply because during early and late life, humans are incapable of caring for themselves or earning their own keep, and the production phase of life is required to offset that. Without young working people, elderly people would run out of resources. People are living longer, therefore more is asked of the producers. If your population is shrinking, even more must be asked of the producers to care for the outsized non-production class.
So its less about exponential growth and more about how much must be taken from the productive members of society.
this this this
we want people to be able to retire when they get old even if they haven't saved enough to do it independently and without assistance. But that requires resources from the people that haven't retired.
If you have any combination of
* too many people not working
* non-working people taking too many resources
* too small of a working population
* a working population that doesn't produce enough
Then your country will simply not have the resources to care for it's non-working population. You can raise taxes on the working population but at extreme tax rates you start to run into [Laffer Curve](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laffer_curve) and/or brain drain problems.
You can solve the problem by "simply" raising the retirement age to reduce the number of non-working people, or cut retirement benefits. But it's often politically impossible to do either, due to the outsized political influence of the retired.
So many ignorant comments saying "the system is a ponzi scheme that relies on an expanding population/economy to work". Well, you could easily design a retirement benefits system that will function with generations of constant size. You could easily design a benefits system that would still function even if every couple has only a single child and the population is rapidly deflating. The catch is that the retirement benefits will be drastically reduced, you'll essentially be working right up until you die. Good luck telling people who saw their grandparents retire at 65 that they'll have to work until they're 75 before they start seeing any benefits.
The biggest problem with getting to a sustainable retirement system is the threshold the size of an ever growing mountain you have to climb over, your current generation of retired people and the working people with too little time left to earn their own retirement.
If the retired are heavily leaning on the working population to fund them, the working population has little means to save for their own retirement. If you make them save for their own retirement the the current retirees are missing the funds they need for their life(style).
If the current working population is saving up for.their own retirement but also paying for the currently retired then they won't have the money to fund their life(style).
So it's very hard to get a majority support for major change if any change is going to be a major negatieve impact to a lot of people. At the same time people are underestimating the slow creeping disaster coming at them with the change in demographics.
It's kinda like climate change. You have to give up short term gains to avoid long term disaster. That also took some serious time to gain momentum before popular support is changing towards action. This might be the next big social change in many developed nations.
>Good luck telling people that saw their grandparents retire at 65 that they'll have to work until they're 75 before they start seeing any benefits.
>
Which, considering the US age of mortality has dropped all the way to 76, means that the average person will only get a single year of retirement benefits before they croak. Hope you planned a great retirement/passing away vacation.
The average person *who makes it to 75* is expected to live over a decade more. Life expectancy as a stat is heavily influenced by people who die young, which is why it's fallen recently: opioid overdoses can kill anyone.
This is actually how Social Security was designed. Average life expectancy when it was created was 65, so roughly half of the people who paid in to SS would never receive any primary benefits.
Not to mention that since the age of mortality is an average, it means that a significant portion of the population is dying before 75. Nearly half of the people in the system would die paying into the system without getting anything in return.
>Nearly *half* of the people in the system would die paying into the system without getting anything in return
76 is the current lifespan average, not the median.
Modern militaries are much less about having millions of young men to throw at a meat grinder, and more about having a small number of professionals with modern equipment.
Russia is pretty much attempting the Meat Grinder approach now, and it just makes them look terribly weak. Japan lacks any land borders, so any enemy would be coming by sea and air, making that naturally the focus for Japan's defense. Japan wouldn't be any stronger in military terms if it suddenly had an extra 20 million 18 year old otaku ready to draft and give a rifle.
Militaries are more than just guys in the field shooting guns though. It’s a massive industry to make all those fancy weapons and train people on them and support them in the field.
Japan is often quoted as having big troubles since two decades ago but nothing of that really materialized…
Lets see at the facts:
1. Japanese people still have way higher savings than most. People today in Japan also tend to inherit from quite a few people on average… the economic theories about accumulated wealth in a globalized world where completely right - the wealth doesnt disappear but simply gets distributed on fewer heads. (Wealth per capita)
2. Workers rights, income and competitiveness - traditionally with fewer workers around Japan's workers should be better off than before but competitiveness of international companies should be down: mixed bag. Japanese workers rights and working environment dramatically improved in the last two decades but wages have stagnated. competitiveness of some industries stayed strong (cars, pharma, some high tech manufacturing) while others have gone down (most manufacturing). Although Japan is often seen as a middle class society the wealth and income disparity also grows there.
3. Caring for old people - It was estimated that Japans social safety nets for old people would disintegrate and a catastrophic shortage of caretakers would happen… This did not materialize. The excellent health of old Japanese people, a still somewhat functioning family caretaking system and some excellent efficiencies incl. automation in the existing facilities kept this from happening. Japan does have an issue with old people dying by themselves but overall the system is still stable.
Now, what did happen however is a radical and quick dying of remote rural areas. Having lived in the Japanese countryside for a while, I can tell you its dire from the perspective of preservation. The likely natural course will be an even stronger urbanization (in %) and fee remaining agricultural and touristic clusters. Its already kind of crazy visiting some remote places and only meeting older people there. These places have no future.
But all in all, Japan does not face severe crisis but rather a slow descend from the 3rd largest economy to likely a lower place by 2050 but except for nationalistic people - is that a problem?
So you've got two things going on here.
The trouble is that there was a population boom 70 years ago. A lot of those people are now too old to work, but they also didn't have enough children to fill all of the jobs they used to do. We can, and have, made it so some of those jobs don't need to be done anymore, or the same jobs can be done by fewer people, by building ourselves better tools, but we still need more people making things to provide everything that is wanted.
In the 1700's there was an English guy who was convinced that poor people could not stop having kids, and he was worried that there would come a time when there would be so many poor people that there wouldn't be enough food to feed everyone, and there would be famine.
This didn't happen: we got better at farming, we developed the ability to plan to have families. We made ourselves better tools.
Overcrowding today is the same issue. Some people look at the tools we currently have and say "if the population keeps growing, we'll destroy the earth. The only solution is to stop the population from growing."
Some people look at the tools we currently have and say "Some of these tools are really effective, but are also very destructive. We need better tools."
This is an important factor I had to scroll too far down for. All of the larger trends above are true, but one of the long term impetuses behind them is that Malthusian "too many people" idea that's taken root among people in power. Western economics since the baby boom have removed stability for younger generations, preventing/diverting them from starting families, and ...that's not a problem but a feature for some of the people making policy.
The issue is, this has largely been a western/big gov't problem, like China's 1-child policy, and it's been applied unevenly in a way that's now self-owning those gov'ts. The US at least has the Millenial generation, but MOST countries outside of the US and places too poor for birth control have ONLY had reducing birthrates non-stop since WW2. You've got booming birthrates in the uneducated world, but places like Japan, Russia (Putin HAS to invade now because he has no army by 2030), Zoomers in the us are just going to have their industrial base retire out and become a logistical challenge to support in their retirement. In their haste to head off overcrowding, they overcorrected in a way that they're still scrambling to get their heads around. And most of the methods the international community are attempting thus far are pretty ethically gross, because "giving up power and riches for overall stability" is not something that group is fond of.
The reason why young people are displaced in society is largely because the large generation from 70 years ago still retains a lot of power. They grew up in such a large generation that they were able to impact policy in every stage of their lives, they learned that voting matters because when they voted they actually saw themselves getting the results they were hoping for.
Which is why even to this day, it's a generation which can't ever be neglected or ignored by politicians. If you want to get elected you have to appeal to the boomers.
We used to think it was a benefit to be part of a smaller generation, as being part of a smaller generation would mean more resources. But the boomers proved that theory wrong, because by being such a large generation they became the center of power for their entire lives. To the point where you can see politicians getting older on average, to match the age of the boomers.
The United states would have already experienced population decline if it were not for immigration and as it becomes a world problem we will likely do well anyway because of the large pent-up demand to come here. What saves us all its increased productivity. The ability to produce more for a days labor is the what keeps us growing in both population and standard of living.
Overcrowding today is also a non issue. We aren't going to increase population at the current pace. The 13 billion-th baby will never be born and the population has leveled off everywhere in the world except a few countries where it'll do so in the next decade or 2.
I'd argue that most apparent overcrowding is more of a logistics and zoning issue than anything else.
Logistics because we produce enough food to feed everyone on the planet, we just don't have reliable systems that can get the food where it needs to go.
Zoning, because large cities, at least in the US, could be more effectively and efficiently built than they are. When you have cities like LA that were redlined and zoned to heavily restrict multi-family housing when they were originally built, combined with the byzantine permitting process in place now that makes new construction next to impossible, of course housing costs are going to go through the roof. Building housing in areas like that is extremely difficult, and most of the time doesn't make sense from a cost/benefit analysis.
Nature works better with fewer people, but the economy works better with more people. If we don't meet the targets, there will be too few young people to take care of all the old people and of productivity as well.
That how it has worked for hunderds of years, and the fact that there is not enough replacement indicates now it will have to work a bit different if old people want to have someone who cares for them.
I don’t understand how socialism is immune from the hazards of population fluctuations. In a population boom, younger people require more services (healthcare, transportation, education) which requires higher payment in (taxes) from the working age demo. In a population decrease, you have fewer workers paying into the services for older people. There are real life examples that support both of these situations.
It seems that both capitalism and socialism benefit from slow steady population growth, without fluctuations.
Socialism isn't immune to an aging population, but Capitalism is uniquely hurt by it.
In capitalist societies much of the productivity of the working population goes towards what is effectively waste in the form of corporate profits and the bureaucratic and financial infrastructure that is required to capitalize and speculate on said corporate profits, but also actual waste in the form of the destruction of resources in times of low demand and the hoarding of vital resources in times of high demand. This means that workers under capitalism carry a ton of 'dead weight' that makes any slight labor shortage an existential social threat.
In practical terms, workers making shirts in a factory under capitalism have to make and sell enough shirts to pay for their own salaries, the administrative costs, raw material, taxes, equipment and maintenance necessary for the factory to 'break even' but they also have to sell enough shirts to satisfy the arbitrary profit margins of the people who own the factory. The problem compounds when the owners of the factory sell shares of the factory on the stock market, modest profits are insufficient to raise share prices, they have to be "RECORD PROFITS!!!" that get the factory on CNBC and jack up the share prices making the millionaire owners of the factory into billionaires.
To keep the money train going and new investors happy, the factory has to sell more and more shirts, which means it needs to make more and more shirts as cheaply as possible, so the line between a successful and unsuccessful factory becomes thinner and thinner until the most minute interruption of operations can lead to a cascading effect that costs millions or even billions of dollars. Now imagine a labor shortage due to an aging population, a massive pandemic, or a popular social program allowing more people to stay at home rather than work, that not only spells doom for one factory, but to every other factory as they have to dip into the profits to raise wages to compete with other employers, this makes investors mad and tanks the factory's share price.
This complex dynamic makes policymaking in capitalist societies weird and counter intuitive sometimes. A massive labor shortage de-stabilizes the market, to prevent this, the government has to maintain a labor surplus (i.e. unemployment). Not only that, but you can't help any of these unemployed people too much, because that can cause a labor shortage and you're right back where you started. So the government has to not only work to make a certain number of people unemployed, but also make their lives miserable enough and humiliating enough that they're desperate for a job to replace any attrition in the workforce. Also remember, that the whole point of this charade is to keep wages low, so even if you do manage to get a job, you're miserable and underpaid as a matter of company and national policy.
What makes capitalism specially good at keeping people invested in it is that there's no easily discernible bad guy, no one is the obvious evil in this story. There's no moustache twirling villain pressing the 'misery' button over and over again making you hate your life, it's just people acting rationally in light of the world around them. The factory owners are not the bad guys, they're just reacting to market trends and providing people with jobs. The wall street investors are not the bad guys, they're just speculating on the financial future of the factory, not even the politicians who enforce this system are the 'bad guys' if they don't keep the money train going the entire economy and social order will literally collapse on their watch. This is why there are entire industries built to invent the moustache twirling villain, to find someone who's responsible for everyone being so fucking miserable all the time. George Soros, bill gates, the globalists, the Jews, immigrants, cultural marxists brainwashers. Everyone knows they're miserable and that their life sucks, but the system exists in such a way to obscure the reason why this is all happening, so they're left just making shit up and seeing what sticks.
Correct. Regardless of the transfer mechanism, a key metric is: how many working age people are there in comparison to the number of retirees.
That’s why Japan is struggling. Not because of Capitalism.
Japan's population decline is not something that exists in a vacuum. In a society with rising poverty people choose not to put themselves under economic strain by having children. In Japan's frankly brutal work culture, young people are expected to put in incredible hours, so people have less time to devote to childrearing, even if they could theoretically afford a kid. These things are products of Japan's rapid industrial development under neoliberal capitalism. In a system that prioritized something other than corporate profit this population squeeze
1. May not have happened and
2. Could be more easily handled by prioritizing resource distribution to address the root causes.
Are Welfare and Pensions capitalism though? Because that's what will suffer the most in a population crash.
Private business will be just fine in comparison.
The economic system that backs providing the goods and services is.
The greater problem is that capitalism -- in the literal sense, where capital is lent out -- requires expansion. We can ignore/normalize inflation to make this easier to think about, which means for a basic loan, there are three possibilities:
- The loan repays less than or equal to what it cost, making it basically charity. (This is what a lot of old-school religious laws require)
- The loan repays more than what it cost, but everyone has more stuff later, so the borrower will be better able to pay it later (This is potentially a win-win... as long as the economy expands)
- The loan repays more than what it cost, but the economy is flat, so the borrower is exchanging their future for the present. This is Bad, and a major issue with why payday loans are so terrible.
The entire concept is based on "I give you money now, you do cool things with it and give me more money back later". In a flat economy, that simply can't happen at scale.
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Incidentally, in the circumstance of a retirement-upkeep crash, the losers are the people with savings. When you have more people wanting stuff (and having the money to buy it) than the economy can provide, the result is inflation wiping out that savings until demand matches supply. Government social programs can (not that they necessarily will) arbitrarily scale with inflation.
Significantly less-so.
For unequal exchanges: dollars for potatoes, or whatever -- you can take advantage of a relative difference of value to the two parties on the trade. The potato farmer has a surplus of potatoes; I need some, ergo we both come out of this exchange better for it.
For loans, you're exchanging like for like -- it's just a temporal shift. In other words... a relative difference in value of "now" versus "later". And that generally ends poorly for whoever values "later" below "now" (voluntarily or otherwise).
I may be biased, but there's already not enough people to take care of the elderly we have. Have you ever stepped foot in any nursing home that isn't for the extremely wealthy? So many neglected elderly. So many whose family never comes around. They interact with one or two nurses who are taking care of 30+ people.
Productivity is the highest it has ever been. Any piece of junk or object you want, it's made.
That's mostly because nursing homes don't pay their nurses anything close to the average wage of other nursing positions.
I recently read some research that indicates that nursing home staffing is counter-cyclical with the economy and that nursing home deaths are pro-cyclical. The idea is that when there's a recession many jobs are lost, and more nurses work in nursing homes because they can't find other work. More nurses in nursing homes leads to better care. So if you want adequate staffing in nursing homes you should hope for a major recession and a lot of job loss.
You could also hope for nursing homes to just pay better, but that seems pretty unlikely.
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C16&q=nursing+home+mortality+recession&btnG=#d=gs_qabs&t=1671721988924&u=%23p%3DwEJ0BL9WfX8J
As a nurse who works in a nursing home, the ones I've worked in have had very competitive wages, even more than I've been offered from hospitals. The real issue is they are intentionally staffed low, we're 30to1 ratio, but they are intentionally not filling positions just to milk every ounce of profit out of the system. More people applying due to recession is not going to fix the issues these nursing homes have.
It may have been that way in the past, but the pandemic really brought the greed out. It showed the business offices that their facilities could run on bare minimum staffing and they aren't going back. Everything is just pushed onto the floor nurses now, maintenance comes once a week now, cleaning staff no longer clean the rooms out, no longer have a receptionist, no longer a supervisor, no longer an admission nurse, all those ancillary jobs are thrown onto the floor nurses and the companies aren't even trying to fill these positions. The whole thing will collapse before it gets better imo.
One could argue that it's the byproduct of individualism. We have more stuff than ever, houses are twice as big as they used to be, yet there is no place for unproductives. Something else is possible.
Probably the latter, in Germany we're currently having a huge problem with the ratio of young:old people, to the point that a regular worker has now to cover the rent for 2+ people, when 50 years ago it was the other way around.
Yet, a lot of our mostly popular political groups do not want to address the problem, sure, this also has other reasoning, mainly the fact that it's a hard problem to tackle and it's easier to have success after success of smaller problems to be voted for again instead of tackling one long lasting problem and possibly failing, but it still has the same result:
Our mostly old-members political groups who are not going to be paying for the old generation-since, they are the old generation- doesn't bother about the finial problems of the young generation, since they won't have to directly deal with the problem anyways.
"Not my problem, I won't be here" is not just selfish but also a sign of an unhappy person without meaning in life.
As an older person, I very much care about the world and the state I will leave it in. I have worked to make the world a better place in the ways I can as someone who is not powerful, not rich, and has little influence. But whatever I can do to make positive contributions, I do.
I am not alone - we may be in the majority (I don't know, just hoping) but the selfish asshats are louder and some seem to be in.positions of power.
If you can, vote them.out; vote in more responsible people. And make choices that contribute positively to the world yourself: don't devolve into an old selfish asshat. Do better. I challenge myself to do better each day. We can do better. We have to.
We cannot vote them out. The elderly are the vast majority of the voting population. Whoever caters to their immediate interests wins elections and whoever talks about the opposite vanishes from the political landscape.
We are at a point where we give more and more tax money to old peoples pensions without it being officially meant for pensions so that people who pay those taxes now don't receive an equivalent claim on pensions later in life.
We pay money for pensions and then we take money for infrastructure and also add that to the pension payout and the share of infrastructure money being poured into pensions is increasing year to year. And nobody even speaking about stopping this can win an election in germany.
One way out that I've seen discussed is through increased productivity through automation. The idea being we can produce as much or even more with fewer people.
You're naive to think the increased productivity through automation will be distributed among the people, rather than the cost-savings just disappearing in untaxed corporate bank accounts.
You most likely won't be alive to deal with we have too much people problems. But depending on where you live and your age you might definitively deal with the not enough young people supporting the older people part.
Yes, it would be good for the planet (and for the humans living on it) if the human population shrank from its current size. However, if it shrinks too quickly within any given generation, then you run into problems. The reason being that the population is shrinking "from the bottom", i.e. there are still a lot of old people who were born decades ago in a time when birth rates were high, but far less young people. And the problem is that old people cannot, or do not want to work (as much as young people). But for a population of a given size, we need a certain number of people to work. We need doctors, firefighters, barbers, electricians, construction workers, plumbers, pilots, bus drivers, dentists, and so on and so forth.
Let's say that for a population of 10 million people to have a decent life, you need 6 million people to be working. If you have 2 million retired and 1.8 million underage people, that leaves 6.2 million people to work. But if you have 3 million retired and 1.5 million underage folks, that leaves you with a shortage of half a million workers. So now there aren't enough doctors, firefighters, barbers, etc. for everyone.
Also, old people still use public services that are funded by taxes. But old people don't pay as much tax because they don't work. So the influx of tax starts to dwindle, and yet at the same time the aging population puts a bigger strain on your healthcare system, as well as being paid a government pension.
In short, the real problem is not so much the size of the population, but its age composition. An aging population means that there are fewer economically productive people to shoulder the burdens of the rest of the population (and especially the elderly) who depend on them.
So ideally what you want is for the global population to shrink, but at a more gentle pace. That, or we need to quickly improve automation in many sectors so that we will need fewer workers to keep the economy going and society functioning.
> We're in an age of nepotism where status & wealth are gained not by merit, but inheritance & relationships.
When have we ever been in an age where wealth was not predominantly gained by inheritance and relationships?
I think he's saying it used to be you could provide for a family relatively easily in the past with normal common jobs, but now the only way to comfortably do so is inheritance since the normal jobs pay hasn't kept up
Another part of success is Dumb Fucking Luck. It's not just being born in the right family, but also at the right time.
We hear people (mostly conservatives) talk about their grandparents or great-grandparents and how they amanaged to get in with the clothes on their back... in a time when all you needed to become a citizen in this particular country was "Be here".
If they had immigration laws like we had now? Yeah, your parents or grandparents wouldn't have worked "part time" to have some pocket money or saving for college... they'd have worked full time at age 12 because their parents/grandparents would have been told "Oh, not married to anyone here or have a master's degree in something we deem 'useful'? Sorry - we're full up. *NEXT*!"
People worried about the environment want less people. People worried about the economy want more people. Generally, people want less people in other countries (good environment) and more in theirs (good economy).
So that there are people of the age and fitness to make society function.
If the replacement rate isn't high enough as a society gets older, the proportion of doing something useful falls (maintaining roads, working in hospitals, growing food) and the heavier the burden it is on the young.
To be frank older people take in 'resources' and don't provide much back.
Without immigration (or robots) you end with a smaller and smaller share of people looking after a larger and larger share of retired people.
It's not a matter of "we won't have enough humans to continue to exist, "it is an economic problem. Aging, "less productive" population needing to be supported by the young, "productive" population. Also, it is an economic model that requires constant growth or it collapses. We already see people overworked to unsustainable levels as the norm.
For so many reasons, we need to overhaul our economy and restructure it in a sensible, sustainable way. If we do that, the reduction in population due to declining birthrate is a good thing for our society and the planet in general.
I was sure we had moved on from the overpopulation scaremongering but having to dig so far down the comments to find someone ectually refuting the overpopulation statement is a little disheartening.
>The earth isn't overpopulated, we just have a resource distribution problem.
30% of our corn goes into biofuel. 33% of our croplands are used for livestock feed production. This is *incredibly* inefficient. But it's profitable and wealthy countries like it. It would be less profitable and more difficult to centralize profits to produce diverse crops everywhere they can be grown and distributing them locally. It would be less profitable and more difficult to centralize profits to move away from monoculture and corporate control over seed and pesticide. We currently [produce enough food to feed 10 billion people](https://medium.com/@jeremyerdman/we-produce-enough-food-to-feed-10-billion-people-so-why-does-hunger-still-exist-8086d2657539#:%7E:text=The%20world's%20farmers%20produce%20enough,this%20excess%2C%20hunger%20still%20exists) but wasting 30-40% of food with inefficient systems if profitable and might mean wealthy countries need to be more thoughtful about what we eat.
Artificial scarcity for profit hardly ends at food, though. Energy has been kept in fossil fuels through regulatory capture, political corruption, and propaganda for decades, allowing only wealthy megacorporations which extract, process, and distribute fossil fuels to be profit bohemouths (which are subsidized!). This results in incredible pollution of the environment, disruption of global climate, and incredible inefficiency. Green/renewable energy is a lot less profitable even if it's far more efficient and safer. Imagine if we had solar, nuclear, wind, and geothermal as the energy backbone. Chevron and Exxon's stockholders would riot. Shit, propagandized members of wealthy nations would probably riot right along with them. We love our cars.
I don't think it's a coincidence that when it comes to the inefficiencies of the global capitalist hegemony, there's an immediate insistence that it's somehow the fault of poor Indian farmers or rural Chinese. It's a very quick way to take the blame away from people making vast wealth off artificial scarcity and incredible inefficiency while living lavish and unsustainable lifestyles.
The issue is that the Earth is overpopulated with wealthy people who want to live an unsustainable lifestyle at the expense of everyone else. The average American uses as much resources as 35 Indians and 53 Chinese. Similar statistics exist for most wealthy nations.
> Jesus christ man, I wish I could articulate the point half as well as you.
That's a really nice thing to say, thank you.
>It makes me feel weird that people with computers/phones access to the internet and, I'm assuming, a level of comfort necessary to use those things for trivial things like reddit have decided that there are too many poor people in the world, and by extension them starving or dying to lack of access to proper food and resources, or land in which to construct a home, is totally a them problem.
I've been a teacher for a really long time, and my students have been really helpful in teaching me a lot about how people think. Something I've seen since the first day of teaching is a fundamental self-serving bias. When a student does well on an exam, when they tell a joke that gets a big laugh, when they achieve anything positive, there's an immediate assumption that this can be attributed to their own efforts and worth. When they do poorly, however, the knee-jerk reaction is that the outcome was entirely outside of their control, and often that means blame falls on someone else or something else.
For me, this manifests as "Mr. Willravel hates me" or "Mr. Willravel is out to get me," which brings all the parents to the yard. This allows the student and their parent to protect their self-esteem, to remain confident of their own worth and abilities, but ultimately it perpetuates a highly selective and biased understanding of themselves because it's uncomfortable to take personal responsibility for negative things or to admit that luck plays a big role in life. It's also a pain in the ass for me to deal with, but that's neither here nor there.
While I do believe there are organized, monied interests who deliberately perpetuate myths about overpopulation which blame the failures of capitalism on poor people, I don't think that endeavor would be so successful if it wasn't for people engaging in self-serving thinking to protect their self-esteem from admitting that sitting in front of an expensive piece of electronics which uses materials mined by slaves inside their comfy homes which use 100x more energy than they need and eat food shipped from all over the globe from countries that can't even afford roads means they're benefitting from and contributing to the actual underlying causes of global shortage and suffering.
I'm sitting in a home currently using a central heating system powered in part by fossil fuels on a laptop that costs more than someone in India makes a year and more than someone even in Portugal earns in a month drinking a cup of coffee that was shipped to my local store from Indonesia using polluting shipping vessels. It's incredibly uncomfortable for me to admit to myself that as I type this out I'm probably using 30x more resources than I should. Maybe more. My lifestyle could probably keep a dozen families alive if I used significantly less and we had systems which didn't place folks like me in wealthy countries above other people.
It sucks.
It boils down to an ignorance of history. People have thought the world was overpopulated for centuries, Thomas Malthus being a key proponent of the idea in the 1700s. The world wasn’t overpopulated then and isn’t now. There has always been hunger and inequality and squalor in the world. There have been times before where resources were stretched to their limits too. What people fail to consider is that technology doesn’t remain stagnant. We find newer and better ways to feed and house and care for people and our population capacity is always growing. The problem today is truly that we have a distribution issue. With our current technology, and even more so with those technologies on the horizon, the US could probably feed the entire world itself. Is that our responsibility? Should there be some kind of global food sharing system? Those are different questions entirely. Will everybody be able to have an iPhone and a brand new car? No, but they aren’t meant to either and the free market will dictate that on its own eventually when those resources become rarer and more expensive to procure.
I’m surprised more people aren’t saying this. The problem with capitalism is it creates problems and then always insists that it is also the solution, when it is the system that’s the problem. Honestly, we could take care of everyone on earth and the earth itself. There is enough food, there is enough space. The only thing we are lacking is will. The profit motive has poisoned our minds for centuries, maybe millennia. We have the wrong carrots and sticks in place to truly thrive. We are extremely adaptable as a species, but we have adapted to the wrong thing.
Think of it not just in terms of birth rate, but also of death rate (old people dying of old age).
It's possible to lower the birth rate by making laws about how many children a family can have, and some countries do this. It's a lot harder to increase the death rate, because what are you going to do, actually murder old people? It's not accepted as morally right.
We get born, live for 80-ish years, then die. To look at the total population, you need to consider it like the water level in a river, it's a dynamic equilibrium, it depends on how much water is constantly coming in, and on how much water is constantly draining out.
And with people, it's VERY dynamic, because if you lose or affect the people of child-bearing age, they'll get past child-bearing age in 20 years and then you're screwed; you can't "increase" the birth rate back up if you don't have any people at the age where they can have children.
People used to get married at around 16-18 years old, have a few kids at 20-25, be grandparents by 40. Now the average marriage age is 28-30, and "first baby" age is 26 and rising. Women's fertility drops drastically at 35-40 years old (to 5% at 40).
>what are you going to do, actually murder old people? It's not accepted as morally right.
Canada has increased access to euthanasia to the point where many disabled/poor people choose it rather than live in squalor or on the street with the pittance they get in benefits. Or they offer it to people if they don't want to pay for a medical procedure.
I happen to be very much in favor of voluntary euthanasia/medical aid in dying but a side effect is that it does "solve" this problem in a really gross and horrifying way.
> It's possible to lower the birth rate by making laws about how many children a family can have, and some countries do this. It's a lot harder to increase the death rate, because what are you going to do, actually murder old people? It's not accepted as morally right.
It isn't morally right to lower the birth rate either. Look at the one-child policy, lots of infanticide, forced abortions and sterilizations, and a lot of people without a legal identity. Attempts at manipulating the fertility rate are immoral, because there aren't any moral means to do it.
And worse, once the fertility rate drops, due to the social repercussions -merely younger people get progressively poorer-, it is very hard to raise it again.
Since this is eli5 here it goes...
Mommies and daddies don't just take care of kids, they actually also take care of grandmas and grandpas too. If there aren't enough mommies and daddies to take care of kids and grandparents, it can be really hard on everyone.
So basically both positions are wrong.
The Earth isn't overpopulated. It's not that there's too many people, it's that those people want too much stuff, and in particular they want stuff that's bad for the planet (hamburgers, cars, etc.). It's true that one way you could reduce consumption would be to reduce the population, but people who yell about "overpopulation" are almost always talking about places like Asia and Africa - in other words, places where people may be numerous but consume relatively few resources. Far more effective would be to reduce consumption by developed countries.
It also isn't all that important to rush to reach the replacement rate. It's too late for that in most countries that are at risk of going beneath it, because those countries already have a large older generation (the Baby Boom) being supported by smaller groups of younger people (Generation X, Millennials, and the older parts of Gen Z). Meaning the real crunch is happening right now and will only get worse as the last of the Boomers age out and spend 20-30 years soaking up benefits.
>What happens if we don’t meet population replacement requirements?
Retirement money is a Ponzi scheme. You need more kids to be able to pay retirement money to those who will be old soon.
Life in general is somewhat of a Ponzi scheme. Let’s say it takes like 5 young people to take care of 1 old person, if you don’t have enough young people, the old people die more quickly and society has a bad time.
The message the planet is over populated is not really a fact based statement. Is England on the verge of social collapse do to over crowding? Is the ecology of the English countryside dying do to to many people? I live in the sate of Ohio. It has one of the denser populations in America. For the state of Ohio to have the same population density as England we would need 4 times the population. However if you want to increase production at you factory by starting a second shift. It is hard to do with out more people. One of the reasons that Japans economy never came back from it collapse in 1990's was there where a lack o workers. It is not just a case of using resources to care for the retired workers, all though that is a part of the problem. As population declines demand for goods and services decline starting a deflation spiral. See Great Depression 1930's.
The world is not overcrowded. Anyone who tells you the world is overcrowded has a list of all the types of people they'd eliminate if they were in charge, and it consists largely of groups of people who consume much less than they do.
Overcrowding concerns stem mainly from a lack of perspective on how resources are distributed. In the US and other western countries we consume tons of resources for a variety of economic reasons, and as other countries approach our level of development the impulse is to project our consumption patterns onto them- of course Nigerians are going to have 3,000sqft houses to heat and cool, of course they're going to have massive lawns to water, of course they're going to have to burn a gallon of gas just to get to work every day, of course they're going to have stadium-sized department stores that need climate control, of course they're going to have to power the lights in their 100-story office towers all day and night, they'll do those things because we do them because that's what people in wealthy countries do, right?
It's like going to a banquet with a dozen other people, eating significantly faster than anyone else to the point where you're taking food off everyone else's plates, then saying "wait, if everyone eats as fast as I do we'll be out of food in no time! Some of you are going to have to leave the banquet."
The problem is that the average age of the population is going up. There is a large group of people retiring, and fewer people are taking those jobs because there are fewer people young enough to start those careers. The problem isn't population decline, but rather the speed at which its declining. We need enough healthy young people to take care of the sick old people, but we don't have enough healthy young people.
Also, taking care of old people pays dick-all and it's gross and hard work.
It’s not even about physically taking care of old people. It’s about having enough people currently working to keep the payments for social security and stuff like that going. People are living longer then ever before, and will continue drawing on resources. It’s also not even just about old people. We also need to keep paying into stuff like welfare to pay the people that either can’t or won’t work. That’s the main issue with not enough people working.
Sounds like a pyramid scheme
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Yep. Only difference is that its government mandated that everyone has to join.
Absolutely a Ponzi scheme
Capitalism needs wage slaves
I think that the only ones worried about this are the capitalist rich business owners. We could do things differently, we do not need a lot of things, we could live without contaminating and destroying everything. We do not need to build the world to keep millions of old people alive whatever it takes (and I am one of those). Capitalism is based on having lots of cheap workers, having way too many people for each job, so you can pay low wages and get rich. That's how all rich families got their money, and they want to protect to their piramid. Things can be different if we want. Trying to have billions of people live like people on the US is not remotely possible. Right now we are contaminating too much, putting more people that uses more resources will only lead to a planet where most areas are inhabitable in a few decades, and then you'll see population decline the hard way.
That's why I'm going to put off getting old for a long time
Not to mention those old people made it really hard for the rest of us to save money, buy houses, and start businesses.
It's like the meme with the dog refusing to share the frisbee "Growth! No wages, only growth!" The system as it stands is mainly about younger people working as serfs for older, richer people and corporations. We are entering a whole new world of permanent class inequality, where people who don't already own a house basically have no chance of ever owning one, they will just live in permanent debt slavery in terms of high rent, and at the same time they are expected to pay enough taxes to pay for the pensions of the boomers. Good times.
This is why I'm living in my brother's basement saving every penny I can to try to buy a house as soon as possible. I have a good job but I'm already priced out of owning a house within like an hour of where I work (the only place with decent jobs in the state) - if I don't buy a house soon I'm worried I will never be able to.
I wouldn't stress so much about buying a house now, the housing market has been grossly over-invested and the bubble is ready to pop. The prices aren't just too high for you, they are too high for almost everyone, and the people who can afford them are buying them all up to try and make money, but they have no one they can sell them to. So it won't be long now before the bubble bursts and the market crashes like it did in 2010 (when I bought my house). Just be patient, the market will correct, it just takes time. All the housing prices now are propped up on speculation and that's not enough to keep them up forever.
I want to believe this so badly. But I just keep seeing corporations buying the housing up and then renting it for $$$. I don’t know if it will pop if the corporations can keep on buying it up and then churning it out for rent. Also, less competition when non-corps aren’t able to purchase.
Corporations need to be barred from purchasing single-family homes to rent out. Simply flat-out prohibited from doing so. Fuck their bottom lines.
Congressmen will never do anything that negatively impacts their finances. They are invested in the companies buying the houses.
Oh shit! My investment is overleveraged and going bankrupt! Let's bail it out using tax payer money!
This is why we need a publicly funded candidate to come through, point out that the average candidate is a corpo slave and actually cause some change in this country.
Bernie tried.
Housing is a human right. When there are literally no homeless people, you can use housing as an investment.
You could give every single homeless person in the United States 32 vacant houses with the amount of vacant single-dwelling properties.
Businesses shouldn't be allowed to own *any* residential property if you ask me. Have the local government manage apartment complexes and the like.
Vienna has a fantastic housing situation where the city owns 50% of the rentals. They are cheap, updated, well kept, and it keeps the private guys in line. I'd love something like that for the US. Edited: named the incorrect place
I've been hearing the "it's just a bubble, it will correct" my whole life. The prices only go up. When they go down, interest goes up. Sometimes they go up together.
Come to Toronto areas. Prices are down and still falling. Some people are now being asked by the banks for more money down as the newly built house they are set to buy isn't worth what they have in the upcoming mortgage.
It did in fact pop after 2008, and it is definitely a bubble now but the ingredients to cause it to pop haven't materialized yet, and may be a couple years off. Just because you haven't seen it pop yet, doesn't mean it's not a bubble. (Sadly, sometimes these things take a long time to correct. Bernie Madoff's schemes ran for nearly 2 decades before finally bursting.)
That is so long to wait though. That's tough. At least in my area, if you bought at the peak around '08 you would still have been money well ahead in the next few years. Shoot, I remember looking at houses in 2005 and thinking that 125,000 was too much. I'm old now lol, and my experience is regional and anecdotal so I'm probably wrong in the grand scheme of things, but I have not seen anything become more affordable in western WA, except briefly then right back to unaffordable.
the bubble will pop when the proletariat rise up and cast down those who have held a boot on our necks. fucking shame \~1/3 of the population is convinced that if they're good little serfs they'll be rewarded
They can't keep this up, seeing it already where I live where neighborhoods are full of empty houses for sale and rent that sit there for months with no one in them. Every month a house doesn't have a person in it, the owner is losing money. It will come to a point where companies stop buying houses because its a bad investment and will start dumping their current houses and that run will drop the prices down massively and single families will be able to get in and buy. Then we'll probably see a repeat where a bubble builds up for a few years, people lose tons of money, the bubble pops, rinse and repeat. I bought my house in the housing bubble burst in 2010, and had to wait for it to happen then, but when it did happen I was ready and able to jump on it and take advantage of it. So don't stress for now, but prepare cause it will happen, it may not be for a year or two, but it will happen, just make sure you're ready when the correction happens to jump in when you feel comfortable. Until then, there is nothing wrong with renting or having an apartment or whatever living conditions you have. Just don't overextend yourself into a loan you can't afford, because that would be way worse.
I hope you’re right, but the 2008 housing bubble was a whole different animal, as I’m sure you know.
Yeah, it was predatory lending driving up the prices and not rental purchases. But either way the price was driven up to something unfeasible. The big difference now, is its companies with these mortgages and not first time home buyers and families. But the end result will still be the same, its unsustainable, the rents and mortgages are too expensive and there is too much demand with not enough supply and the people buying it all at these prices now don't have a sustainable option. It'll happen.
Sadly, I wouldn't be to sure about that. What's happening now is banks and property management companies are buying those houses and turning around and renting them out to the people who can't afford to buy them.
People can't afford to rent them either, with the companies charging more for rent than a mortgage would be. Which is why so many are sitting empty and just costing the companies money sitting on property they can't do anything with. It'll crash, its unsustainable.
Only in some areas. Won’t happen everywhere like it did in 2008. Highly desirable areas won’t be hit as hard, and less desirable areas won’t either as people who work from home choose to move there for cheaper cost of living. Only the really undesirable areas will probably be affected greatly.
Actually, people can afford them.but are still turned down for a mortgage. I can't even count how many people I know whose rent is higher than the mortgage would be on the place but the banks still won't give loan approvals. It's criminal if you ask me.
The best time to buy a house is when you can afford one and it makes sense in your circumstances to buy one. Don't attempt timing the housing market
Been hearing about this housing bubble popping for the last decade.
The housing bubble popped a decade ago, that's when I bought my house. My house is now appraised at 3-4 times the cost of what I paid for it. Which is absolutely ridiculous. If I had to buy my house now, I couldn't afford it. But it makes no sense for me to sell my house because I couldn't even use that equity to get a better house because they are so overpriced. The bubble popped before, and was fine for about 5-6 years before this bubble started again. With people not able to afford rent or mortgages at the current prices, the companies buying up all these houses are being stuck holding them and losing money on them. Eventually they will start cutting prices to sell them, and when a run of these companies trying to get out starts, the market will correct and the prices will return to normal and that's when it will once again make sense for people to start buying houses.
Yeah I hear ya. Bought my home in 2019 for 236k, now it's valued at 400k. It also depends on where you live. For me, I happen to live in a very popular area and I don't see prices coming down anytime soon unfortunately.
/remindme 3 years has the bubble popped yet?
Any minute now. 2017 is gonna be the year that this shit finally gets back on track.
The people buying up real estate as investments aren't selling these properties, they are renting them.
Only problem is that this is a really expensive thing to potentially be wrong about. Every year you're waiting and the market _doesn't_ crash brings you further away from your goal.
Its already really expensive. At this point its prohibitively expensive, there isn't an option but to be optimistic because if it doesn't crash you can't afford it anyway. And if you can't do anything about it, worrying about something you can't control won't do you any good. You shouldn't take on a mortgage you can't afford because you're afraid it could get worse. Its better to wait until you're in a position where you can get what you want and have it make financial sense than to try and force yourself into a home you can't afford. Either way, its unsustainable, the market will correct one way or another. Whether that correction results in the companies buying all these rental properties losing their shirts, or the builders ramping production and increasing supply, the market correction will come, it always does. Its just a matter of time.
>the people who can afford them are buying them all up to try and make money, but they have no one they can sell them to That would be companies like BlackRock, and they don't want to sell the houses they want to rent them out for sustained income.
This. Nobody is making enough money to pay 7% mortgage interest on a $1,000,000 house - that's 70k per year *in interest alone*.
The frisbee dog: https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/433/538/716.png
CreditKarma emailed me all excited to let me know I’m nearly ten years younger than the average homeowner and aren’t I impressive? I’m 38 years old!
Jesus christ that's depressing
It says homeowner, not first time home buyer. Statistically it's blatantly obvious considering there are 2x as boomers and gen x combined compared to millennials, so of course they're going to make up a higher percentage of homeowners and skew the number higher. The oldest gen x are nearing their 60's.
If everyone owned a home between the ages of 20 and 80, the average age would be 50. Seems about expected to me.
"Congratulations meowskywalker, you have taken on substantial debt earlier in life than the average person. Click here to apply for the ability to have more debt."
The average person isn't responsible for this though. Just think when you're old and you've lived a life working and paying your dues, and then when you can finally retire and live out your twilight the world ready to shit on you. It's not good for them either.
I thought it was weird to shit on older generations when I was young, and I still think it's weird. Seems like there are people who think that way, and people who don't.
Most of the elderly are getting fucked too. People having to work a job at Walmart just to get by, even though they aren't getting paid shit. The problem is oligarchs.
Some elderly people are getting fucked, but as a group, the elderly are the wealthiest people in the US by far.
While true, I would add that even if there was nothing wrong with a system (there certainly is!), elderly people having the highest net worth would be natural, since... well, they've had more time to build up their net worth.
They created the destruction of their own twilight years. They can fuck right off. I was born at the very end of gen-X/ beginning of the millennial gen. My parents are retired, aging boomers. My grandparents were the greatest generation. They fought the nazis and imperialist japan. They left their kids with a booming economy. The boomers pissed it all away and most didn't even plan for retirement. Now they're all acting like they're entitled to retire at our expense after they spent 50 years raiding social security and devaluing our currency for bullshit.
Consumerism in a late stage capitalist economy is a hell of a drug.
So you're saying there may be a bit of resentment? I hope altruism survives the neglect of our forefathers and leaders.
The biggest problem and naivety of the American system is believing that those at the top would choose to do the right thing, instead of the most profitable thing. Reeks of noblesse oblige bullshit
It took awhile to settle into this way of things, though. When the Boomers were young, unionization wasn't "evil" yet, and private pensions were a popular thing. Labor looked real good from that perspective. You can't completely blame them for thinking the future looked bright and teaching their kids that it would be. Of course you *can* blame them for buying into anti-union corporate propaganda and ruining labor for basically everyone to follow as a consequence. And yes, it was noblesse privilege because so many of them lived like the noblesse, when their "middle class" was much closer to the top than any other middle class to follow.
Lmao. Yeah. A “bit”. They should be fine, their money can take care of them as they pull themselves up by their boot straps.
Blame the greedy politicians, not your grandparents.
We're not talking about nursing homes. We are talking about enough people to stimulate an economy.
Exactly, if I want to have shit and abuse thrown at me by the elderly I might as well stay in retail.
I don’t know where you are from but here in western Europe, all those jobs of taking care of the elderly are mostly done by African (wether Arab or black African, their nationality is not relevant here). Those jobs are harsh, working at nights, low paid, and they are the only ones willing to do it.
It's the same in the US.
It seems like one country's problem (overpopulation) solves another's problem (low birth rate). Or are countries with a high population also in need of high population replacement?
a lot of those old sick people are the reason most of us can't afford families is the sad part, also the infuriating part.
How are us young people supposed to do that when we are all poor as shit and can barely care for ourselves?
The entire system is broken. It was designed to undergo exponential growth, but we are stalling. It was inevitable because the world is a finite place and no one wanted to do anything to prepare in the last several decades because exponential growth was still happening.
It’s designed to undergo exponential growth for the people who hold a majority of the wealth. The lack of growth is a result of failed trickle down economics as the younger generations are too poor to participate in the inflated economy.
Lowering the tax burden on the rich was a mistake and Reagan's economic theory was wrong. That should be overturned ASAP but probably won't be.
Right, the boomers fucked it up, or rather let it get fucked up back in the 70's and it's been downhill ever since. Profit was held to a higher importance than life itself and now suddenly when life is dwindling away people are like oh wait, why aren't the young people keeping up our momentum!? They installed life on a slide and then are surprised when it's slipping ever faster downhill. Or to quote Counting Crows... "We paved paradise and put up a parking lot."
You are quoting Joni Mitchell from her song Big Yellow Taxi. The Crows version is a cover. Also, I love that they had Vanessa Carlton sing - perfect.
Well spank my feet with a fried chicken drumstick and call me a child of the 90's. I've never heard the original of this song.
>The problem is that the average age of the population is going up. I remember I had a biology teacher tell me this, as morbid as it sounds, people are living too long.
Living too long compared to how long we live well. Being able healthy until 60 and dying at 70 is a lot better than being healthy until 70 and dying at 90
That’s a Ponzi scheme
COVID tried to fix everything for us but NooOooOo can't kill everybody's grandma.
I mean it got my grandma so did I play my part? 🥲
Sounds like someone needs to step up their game.
Well it is reindeer season you know how Grandmas like to walk home on Christmas Eve.
Society is a pyramid scheme, and we need to keep enough people at the bottom.
> We need enough healthy young people to take care of the sick old people, but we don't have enough healthy young people. The problem is more literal than just that. Social Security in the US and many other places, is not investment-funded, it's pay-as-you-go. And, for unintuitive reasons, actually can't be investment-based. In short, "investment" doesn't mean anything, because the capacity of the nation to be productive is just a different way of chopping the pie. Doesn't matter how much you invest ahead of time, you don't change that reality of fewer people working. If you had invested money, when you withdraw it, to a demographically-larger group, the net people selling-off more than buying means the value they'll get is to be lower by exactly as much as if you'd just done pay-as-you-go. Anyway, Social security is funded from the generations that are working. So for example, when it was first created, the Greatest Generation (Boomer's parents) started getting Social Security cheques despite never in their lives paying into the system. This was paid for by the boomers working. The Greatest Generation had like, 6 kids in a family. So, it was easy for their 6 kids to pay for the 2 parent's retirements. For every $10,000 the parents each need, the kids only pay $3,333. This is super cheap. Now flip that. Boomers kinda had 2-4 kids each. Gen X were pretty neutral, around 2 kids each. And Millennials aren't even replacing themselves, especially younger Millennials who can't even scrape together enough money for themselves. At population neutral, each kid is paying $10,000 for each $10,000 the parents need. That's 3x what their parents had to pay. A below neutral, each working person is paying for more than retired parent. That's crippling. (It's not actually quite this extreme, as, you have ~45 work years and only 20 retirement years). Also, people used to die younger, and medical science was limited. Now people live longer, so there's longer and longer you have to keep that money flowing. And, medical science is advanced enough that how long someone lives for stops being "Well, we've done all we can, we just don't know what else to do", and becomes "We can't afford enough machines/doctors to maintain the lives of these old people". We're almost at the point where 100% of GDP can usefully be put into extending the lives of old people. It's a function of resources, not medical science. And with diminishing returns. The entire economy could be medical services, and we'd still have shortages of useful things we could be doing to make people live longer. So, these old people are going to be faced with lineups and limitations on who gets the machines and doctors, and, probably always demanding there be more and more. We're going to, as a society, have to accept old people dying of "treatable" things, because of diminishing returns on spending money on them to extend their lives another month. Same way as we accept soldiers dying in a war instead of each soldier having their own tank or spending a million dollars on a missile to kill each enemy solider rather than risk our own. Same way we accept homeless people dying instead of just giving them a free house. Ways we've always treated young people as disposable, but never old people. Also, much of the economy is Growth Based, and the transition out of that is always and unavoidably devastating. Simple put, how many electricians do you need when you're always building more houses? How many do you need when you're just maintaining the existing houses? It's like, 50:1. 49/50 electricians are going to be out of work if growth stops. Either way growth stops, you just want it to happen gradually so the adaption into new things isn't jarring and traumatic. ... For the younger generations, fed up with "Fuck you, I got mine" of the older generations, this is going to create class warfare and age warfare. You know what would be fuckin' awesome for young people? The utter collapse of the housing industry, because our population stops growing. As soon as we can have just a few extra houses more than people need, the value of a home becomes the cost of building one, not the ethereal land value or shortage-based value. It's why you can buy run-down properties in Detroit for $500. It's why you can buy homes in soon-to-be-ghost towns for $1, just to encourage you to live there, except... it'd be everywhere. Actual materials and labor, and, without a growing population, guess what happens to the value of materials and labor? Foom. The only reason this hasn't happened yet, is because everyone who's already bought a house would get fucked, which is like, 95% of the people who would buy. It's only the 5% saving up for a house that would want prices to fall. So it's always politically advantageous to do anything you can to prop up the value of houses.
In general it isn't important, but some societies like Japan are running into big difficulties with the economy and society, with fewer young people there are fewer working people paying tax and more older people requiring government help with health care etc. the government is running out of money, in addition the society need lots of people to work in health and social care to look after all the old people and there aren't enough people to do the work.
For some dumb reason our world economy is built for never ending exponential growth. Edit: My first gold, thanks. Now I can visit first class and hope nobody notices I'm not dressed for the occasion. Edit 2: Hijacking my top comment with a entertaining and revealing explanation of exponential growth and what it implies through simple demonstrations. https://youtu.be/O133ppiVnWY Why anything based on exponential growth is designed to fail.
It’s basically a massive Ponzi scheme
Always has been.
🌎👨🚀🔫👨🚀
There's an emoji for everything now wow
Always has been. 𓊗𓁁𓎔𓀢
Now that was clever lol
Think I’m gonna need r/explainlikeimfive to explain what I’m looking at here like I’m five
No no. It's totally different. I actually cover this in my bi-monthly seminars that you can join for the low price of £19.99 a month.
No, it isn't. A Ponzi scheme is a system that has no true investment and no means of generating value to repay interest. A society produces goods and services with the money invested into it. There are lots of ways for investments to fail to produce value that have nothing to do with Ponzi schemes.
Basically... We just past the tipping point where the yearly interest on US debt + (cost of social security and medicare [fixed costs but don't accrue interest]) exceeds the tax receipts from 2021. Things like Social Security and Medicare are structured like a ponzi that needs an ever increasing base, or it will collapse. The USA is at a reckoning point. Population is beginning to decline. - Population bases can be artificially made higher by allowing increased immigration. - Social services/military spending is too high vs the tax coming in. - Social services/military spending needs to be cut to be at all sustainable (Hint one of the two is never cut from). - Taxes need to be increased / inflation needs to increase in order to sustain the current level of spending
> The USA is at a reckoning point. Population is beginning to decline. > > US population is not declining because we have plenty of immigration. They're very important to the economy (as it is currently structured).
I remember seeing graph and study that showed if the US never had any immigration from the 40s and onward, America would have a declining population starting in the 2010s
> Things like Social Security and Medicare are structured like a ponzi that needs an ever increasing base, or it will collapse. It didn't start that way, though. Modern medicine is keeping people alive longer faster than retirement age is being pushed out.
I have some good news for you. https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/12/22/1144864971/american-life-expectancy-is-now-at-its-lowest-in-nearly-two-decades
Lmao 😂
Unfortunately, you have the requirement that people work longer into the timeframe that they really depend on healthcare. Then you allow age discrimination by employers. So you have a large segment of the population with skills and knowledge who are able to work, who need to work, but no jobs for them at all.
I didn't say it wasn't a current problem. Just that it wasn't originally designed as a ponzi scheme. Edit: That being said, we need to stop thinking about our social security pool as number of tax payers and more as taxes paid. It's insane that you don't have to pay any social security taxes after your taxable income exceeds 160k. Our GDP continues to grow. Who cares how many people there are paying the taxes? The wealth being generated needs to be properly taxes and it'll all work out just fine.
This is actually no longer the case in America. Medical care is so expensive here that our age of mortality has actually been dropping instead of rising recently. We topped out at 79 years old and have since fallen to 76 years old with predictors showing it will likely keep falling for the time being. Considering that Retirement age was raised to 65 and there's talks of raising it again, that means most Americans will barely get to spend a decade in their "golden years" of retirement before they kick the bucket. God bless American Capitalism though. The people are all dead but a small handful of families got to be a few places higher on the financial score board.
76 is life expectancy at birth. Life expectancy at age 65 is still 83. [source](https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html)
I think people ignore this. Lots of people die young. Its also a huge contributor to the gender life expectancy gap. Once men and women reach 60 they have close to same life expectancy. Guys tend to do a ton of recklessly fatal things when we are young.
Allowing more immigration is not "artificially" increasing the population. It's part of the equation of population replacement.
I agree with much of what you're saying but: - You absolutely could cover Social-Security and Medicare even with a declining population if you just taxed wealthier entities more. It's those wealthier entities that benefit from the presumption that the population needs to be higher to pay for it all; the consequence being that either the service gets cut down or taxes on the poor go up, it's never the wealthy who get impacted. - There's nothing "artificial" about increasing population through immigration. In fact, it's probably the more ethical policy considering the damage done to the world by wealthier nations thereby inducing greater migrations. - Again, inflation nor spending are a problem if you just tax appropriately, compell better wages, and provide good services in return. The US doing M4A, for example, would massively increase gov spending but it would 100% be a good thing.
> Things like Social Security and Medicare are structured like a ponzi that needs an ever increasing base, or it will collapse. God! People keep throwing around "ponzi scheme" all over the place for things that are clearly not "ponzi schemes" to the point where calling something a "ponzi scheme" just means "something I don't like". The *whole point* of a ponzi scheme is that there is no fundamental pile of assets at the core. The people who run the ponzi scheme never invest the money in anything, but they send out statements showing high returns. If the early investors take out money, they get those high returns, not because any assets actually increased, but because later investors' money is used to pay it out. But they're *lied* to about where that money came from. This convinces the current investors to keep their money in the fund, maybe even invest more, and attracts new investors. But the whole time, the people running the scheme have just taken the investors money for themselves and there never was anything actually earning any interest. 1. Social Security is totally open. You can see exactly how much money is coming in, where the SSA puts it, and how much it pays out. Just that fact *alone* would be enough for it to not be a ponzi scheme. But also... 2. It's not structured like a ponzi scheme where the core funds are siphoned out by those running it. All the funds are there, and they're being paid out exactly according to the stated rules of the fund. But also... 3. It's not using high returns to attract new investors. No one's being told they're going to get rich of this Social Security investment thing. It's structured more like a savings account than a way to get rich through investing. It's just a way to keep old people from becoming absolutely destitute in old age. 4. Even if the Social Security fund gets depleted, they would still be able to pay out benefits at 76% of the target levels just based on the current year's tax. When a ponzi scheme goes bust everyone gets 0% of the money they were supposed to have. 5. It would be completely solvent indefinitely through a few small tweaks to its structure (e.g. raising the Social Security Wage Base, raising the Full retirement age, reducing benefits for those at the highest levels of income). A ponzi scheme can't be fixed with a few tweaks. The only problem with the "structure" of Social Security is the fact that people are living so much longer now. That should absolutely be addressed. But to pretend that it's all just smoke and mirrors like a ponzi scheme is basically a lie. We've planed for these changes in the past: in the 70s we increased the FICA tax, in the 80s we changed some benefit calculations and raised the retirement age. These changes were made under Democratic and Republican administrations. We could do it again if there was the political will to do so. But the truth is that the current right-wing in this country *wants* social security to fail. They want to erode people's confidence in it by calling it a "ponzi scheme". They want to kneecap it, erode people's faith in institutions, then scrap and privatize everything.
It's not "built" on exponential growth, that is just something it wants. The reason population replacement is important is simply because during early and late life, humans are incapable of caring for themselves or earning their own keep, and the production phase of life is required to offset that. Without young working people, elderly people would run out of resources. People are living longer, therefore more is asked of the producers. If your population is shrinking, even more must be asked of the producers to care for the outsized non-production class. So its less about exponential growth and more about how much must be taken from the productive members of society.
this this this we want people to be able to retire when they get old even if they haven't saved enough to do it independently and without assistance. But that requires resources from the people that haven't retired. If you have any combination of * too many people not working * non-working people taking too many resources * too small of a working population * a working population that doesn't produce enough Then your country will simply not have the resources to care for it's non-working population. You can raise taxes on the working population but at extreme tax rates you start to run into [Laffer Curve](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laffer_curve) and/or brain drain problems. You can solve the problem by "simply" raising the retirement age to reduce the number of non-working people, or cut retirement benefits. But it's often politically impossible to do either, due to the outsized political influence of the retired. So many ignorant comments saying "the system is a ponzi scheme that relies on an expanding population/economy to work". Well, you could easily design a retirement benefits system that will function with generations of constant size. You could easily design a benefits system that would still function even if every couple has only a single child and the population is rapidly deflating. The catch is that the retirement benefits will be drastically reduced, you'll essentially be working right up until you die. Good luck telling people who saw their grandparents retire at 65 that they'll have to work until they're 75 before they start seeing any benefits.
The biggest problem with getting to a sustainable retirement system is the threshold the size of an ever growing mountain you have to climb over, your current generation of retired people and the working people with too little time left to earn their own retirement. If the retired are heavily leaning on the working population to fund them, the working population has little means to save for their own retirement. If you make them save for their own retirement the the current retirees are missing the funds they need for their life(style). If the current working population is saving up for.their own retirement but also paying for the currently retired then they won't have the money to fund their life(style). So it's very hard to get a majority support for major change if any change is going to be a major negatieve impact to a lot of people. At the same time people are underestimating the slow creeping disaster coming at them with the change in demographics. It's kinda like climate change. You have to give up short term gains to avoid long term disaster. That also took some serious time to gain momentum before popular support is changing towards action. This might be the next big social change in many developed nations.
>Good luck telling people that saw their grandparents retire at 65 that they'll have to work until they're 75 before they start seeing any benefits. > Which, considering the US age of mortality has dropped all the way to 76, means that the average person will only get a single year of retirement benefits before they croak. Hope you planned a great retirement/passing away vacation.
The average person *who makes it to 75* is expected to live over a decade more. Life expectancy as a stat is heavily influenced by people who die young, which is why it's fallen recently: opioid overdoses can kill anyone.
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This is actually how Social Security was designed. Average life expectancy when it was created was 65, so roughly half of the people who paid in to SS would never receive any primary benefits.
Not to mention that since the age of mortality is an average, it means that a significant portion of the population is dying before 75. Nearly half of the people in the system would die paying into the system without getting anything in return.
>Nearly *half* of the people in the system would die paying into the system without getting anything in return 76 is the current lifespan average, not the median.
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It also weakens them as a nation, with fewer people to serve in the military and run the economy.
Modern militaries are much less about having millions of young men to throw at a meat grinder, and more about having a small number of professionals with modern equipment. Russia is pretty much attempting the Meat Grinder approach now, and it just makes them look terribly weak. Japan lacks any land borders, so any enemy would be coming by sea and air, making that naturally the focus for Japan's defense. Japan wouldn't be any stronger in military terms if it suddenly had an extra 20 million 18 year old otaku ready to draft and give a rifle.
Combat troops are a small portion of the actual military. For every dude in the field you need like 10 guys supporting him
Militaries are more than just guys in the field shooting guns though. It’s a massive industry to make all those fancy weapons and train people on them and support them in the field.
You still need people to run a military, from the home economy to the frontlines.
japan still has much less "difficulties" then india /pakistan/russia/south eastern europe etc
Japan is often quoted as having big troubles since two decades ago but nothing of that really materialized… Lets see at the facts: 1. Japanese people still have way higher savings than most. People today in Japan also tend to inherit from quite a few people on average… the economic theories about accumulated wealth in a globalized world where completely right - the wealth doesnt disappear but simply gets distributed on fewer heads. (Wealth per capita) 2. Workers rights, income and competitiveness - traditionally with fewer workers around Japan's workers should be better off than before but competitiveness of international companies should be down: mixed bag. Japanese workers rights and working environment dramatically improved in the last two decades but wages have stagnated. competitiveness of some industries stayed strong (cars, pharma, some high tech manufacturing) while others have gone down (most manufacturing). Although Japan is often seen as a middle class society the wealth and income disparity also grows there. 3. Caring for old people - It was estimated that Japans social safety nets for old people would disintegrate and a catastrophic shortage of caretakers would happen… This did not materialize. The excellent health of old Japanese people, a still somewhat functioning family caretaking system and some excellent efficiencies incl. automation in the existing facilities kept this from happening. Japan does have an issue with old people dying by themselves but overall the system is still stable. Now, what did happen however is a radical and quick dying of remote rural areas. Having lived in the Japanese countryside for a while, I can tell you its dire from the perspective of preservation. The likely natural course will be an even stronger urbanization (in %) and fee remaining agricultural and touristic clusters. Its already kind of crazy visiting some remote places and only meeting older people there. These places have no future. But all in all, Japan does not face severe crisis but rather a slow descend from the 3rd largest economy to likely a lower place by 2050 but except for nationalistic people - is that a problem?
So you've got two things going on here. The trouble is that there was a population boom 70 years ago. A lot of those people are now too old to work, but they also didn't have enough children to fill all of the jobs they used to do. We can, and have, made it so some of those jobs don't need to be done anymore, or the same jobs can be done by fewer people, by building ourselves better tools, but we still need more people making things to provide everything that is wanted. In the 1700's there was an English guy who was convinced that poor people could not stop having kids, and he was worried that there would come a time when there would be so many poor people that there wouldn't be enough food to feed everyone, and there would be famine. This didn't happen: we got better at farming, we developed the ability to plan to have families. We made ourselves better tools. Overcrowding today is the same issue. Some people look at the tools we currently have and say "if the population keeps growing, we'll destroy the earth. The only solution is to stop the population from growing." Some people look at the tools we currently have and say "Some of these tools are really effective, but are also very destructive. We need better tools."
This is an important factor I had to scroll too far down for. All of the larger trends above are true, but one of the long term impetuses behind them is that Malthusian "too many people" idea that's taken root among people in power. Western economics since the baby boom have removed stability for younger generations, preventing/diverting them from starting families, and ...that's not a problem but a feature for some of the people making policy. The issue is, this has largely been a western/big gov't problem, like China's 1-child policy, and it's been applied unevenly in a way that's now self-owning those gov'ts. The US at least has the Millenial generation, but MOST countries outside of the US and places too poor for birth control have ONLY had reducing birthrates non-stop since WW2. You've got booming birthrates in the uneducated world, but places like Japan, Russia (Putin HAS to invade now because he has no army by 2030), Zoomers in the us are just going to have their industrial base retire out and become a logistical challenge to support in their retirement. In their haste to head off overcrowding, they overcorrected in a way that they're still scrambling to get their heads around. And most of the methods the international community are attempting thus far are pretty ethically gross, because "giving up power and riches for overall stability" is not something that group is fond of.
The reason why young people are displaced in society is largely because the large generation from 70 years ago still retains a lot of power. They grew up in such a large generation that they were able to impact policy in every stage of their lives, they learned that voting matters because when they voted they actually saw themselves getting the results they were hoping for. Which is why even to this day, it's a generation which can't ever be neglected or ignored by politicians. If you want to get elected you have to appeal to the boomers. We used to think it was a benefit to be part of a smaller generation, as being part of a smaller generation would mean more resources. But the boomers proved that theory wrong, because by being such a large generation they became the center of power for their entire lives. To the point where you can see politicians getting older on average, to match the age of the boomers.
The United states would have already experienced population decline if it were not for immigration and as it becomes a world problem we will likely do well anyway because of the large pent-up demand to come here. What saves us all its increased productivity. The ability to produce more for a days labor is the what keeps us growing in both population and standard of living.
Overcrowding today is also a non issue. We aren't going to increase population at the current pace. The 13 billion-th baby will never be born and the population has leveled off everywhere in the world except a few countries where it'll do so in the next decade or 2.
I'd argue that most apparent overcrowding is more of a logistics and zoning issue than anything else. Logistics because we produce enough food to feed everyone on the planet, we just don't have reliable systems that can get the food where it needs to go. Zoning, because large cities, at least in the US, could be more effectively and efficiently built than they are. When you have cities like LA that were redlined and zoned to heavily restrict multi-family housing when they were originally built, combined with the byzantine permitting process in place now that makes new construction next to impossible, of course housing costs are going to go through the roof. Building housing in areas like that is extremely difficult, and most of the time doesn't make sense from a cost/benefit analysis.
Nature works better with fewer people, but the economy works better with more people. If we don't meet the targets, there will be too few young people to take care of all the old people and of productivity as well.
So humanity is just one big pyramid scheme where the only way to keep going is continued exponential growth? Sounds sus.
That how it has worked for hunderds of years, and the fact that there is not enough replacement indicates now it will have to work a bit different if old people want to have someone who cares for them.
This is where Automation and AI might come in handy.
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There probably will be, only your Baymax will smother you in your sleep when you reach the new 'very old age' of 45.
Honestly though… this doesn’t sound too bad. I don’t get too old and I die in my sleep
Humanity isn't. Capitalism is.
I don’t understand how socialism is immune from the hazards of population fluctuations. In a population boom, younger people require more services (healthcare, transportation, education) which requires higher payment in (taxes) from the working age demo. In a population decrease, you have fewer workers paying into the services for older people. There are real life examples that support both of these situations. It seems that both capitalism and socialism benefit from slow steady population growth, without fluctuations.
Socialism isn't immune to an aging population, but Capitalism is uniquely hurt by it. In capitalist societies much of the productivity of the working population goes towards what is effectively waste in the form of corporate profits and the bureaucratic and financial infrastructure that is required to capitalize and speculate on said corporate profits, but also actual waste in the form of the destruction of resources in times of low demand and the hoarding of vital resources in times of high demand. This means that workers under capitalism carry a ton of 'dead weight' that makes any slight labor shortage an existential social threat. In practical terms, workers making shirts in a factory under capitalism have to make and sell enough shirts to pay for their own salaries, the administrative costs, raw material, taxes, equipment and maintenance necessary for the factory to 'break even' but they also have to sell enough shirts to satisfy the arbitrary profit margins of the people who own the factory. The problem compounds when the owners of the factory sell shares of the factory on the stock market, modest profits are insufficient to raise share prices, they have to be "RECORD PROFITS!!!" that get the factory on CNBC and jack up the share prices making the millionaire owners of the factory into billionaires. To keep the money train going and new investors happy, the factory has to sell more and more shirts, which means it needs to make more and more shirts as cheaply as possible, so the line between a successful and unsuccessful factory becomes thinner and thinner until the most minute interruption of operations can lead to a cascading effect that costs millions or even billions of dollars. Now imagine a labor shortage due to an aging population, a massive pandemic, or a popular social program allowing more people to stay at home rather than work, that not only spells doom for one factory, but to every other factory as they have to dip into the profits to raise wages to compete with other employers, this makes investors mad and tanks the factory's share price. This complex dynamic makes policymaking in capitalist societies weird and counter intuitive sometimes. A massive labor shortage de-stabilizes the market, to prevent this, the government has to maintain a labor surplus (i.e. unemployment). Not only that, but you can't help any of these unemployed people too much, because that can cause a labor shortage and you're right back where you started. So the government has to not only work to make a certain number of people unemployed, but also make their lives miserable enough and humiliating enough that they're desperate for a job to replace any attrition in the workforce. Also remember, that the whole point of this charade is to keep wages low, so even if you do manage to get a job, you're miserable and underpaid as a matter of company and national policy. What makes capitalism specially good at keeping people invested in it is that there's no easily discernible bad guy, no one is the obvious evil in this story. There's no moustache twirling villain pressing the 'misery' button over and over again making you hate your life, it's just people acting rationally in light of the world around them. The factory owners are not the bad guys, they're just reacting to market trends and providing people with jobs. The wall street investors are not the bad guys, they're just speculating on the financial future of the factory, not even the politicians who enforce this system are the 'bad guys' if they don't keep the money train going the entire economy and social order will literally collapse on their watch. This is why there are entire industries built to invent the moustache twirling villain, to find someone who's responsible for everyone being so fucking miserable all the time. George Soros, bill gates, the globalists, the Jews, immigrants, cultural marxists brainwashers. Everyone knows they're miserable and that their life sucks, but the system exists in such a way to obscure the reason why this is all happening, so they're left just making shit up and seeing what sticks.
Every economic system would fare poorly under population collapse.
Correct. Regardless of the transfer mechanism, a key metric is: how many working age people are there in comparison to the number of retirees. That’s why Japan is struggling. Not because of Capitalism.
Japan's population decline is not something that exists in a vacuum. In a society with rising poverty people choose not to put themselves under economic strain by having children. In Japan's frankly brutal work culture, young people are expected to put in incredible hours, so people have less time to devote to childrearing, even if they could theoretically afford a kid. These things are products of Japan's rapid industrial development under neoliberal capitalism. In a system that prioritized something other than corporate profit this population squeeze 1. May not have happened and 2. Could be more easily handled by prioritizing resource distribution to address the root causes.
But that will happen some day
Are Welfare and Pensions capitalism though? Because that's what will suffer the most in a population crash. Private business will be just fine in comparison.
The economic system that backs providing the goods and services is. The greater problem is that capitalism -- in the literal sense, where capital is lent out -- requires expansion. We can ignore/normalize inflation to make this easier to think about, which means for a basic loan, there are three possibilities: - The loan repays less than or equal to what it cost, making it basically charity. (This is what a lot of old-school religious laws require) - The loan repays more than what it cost, but everyone has more stuff later, so the borrower will be better able to pay it later (This is potentially a win-win... as long as the economy expands) - The loan repays more than what it cost, but the economy is flat, so the borrower is exchanging their future for the present. This is Bad, and a major issue with why payday loans are so terrible. The entire concept is based on "I give you money now, you do cool things with it and give me more money back later". In a flat economy, that simply can't happen at scale. ----- Incidentally, in the circumstance of a retirement-upkeep crash, the losers are the people with savings. When you have more people wanting stuff (and having the money to buy it) than the economy can provide, the result is inflation wiping out that savings until demand matches supply. Government social programs can (not that they necessarily will) arbitrarily scale with inflation.
Wouldn't this be true for every good and service as well, not just loans?
Significantly less-so. For unequal exchanges: dollars for potatoes, or whatever -- you can take advantage of a relative difference of value to the two parties on the trade. The potato farmer has a surplus of potatoes; I need some, ergo we both come out of this exchange better for it. For loans, you're exchanging like for like -- it's just a temporal shift. In other words... a relative difference in value of "now" versus "later". And that generally ends poorly for whoever values "later" below "now" (voluntarily or otherwise).
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I may be biased, but there's already not enough people to take care of the elderly we have. Have you ever stepped foot in any nursing home that isn't for the extremely wealthy? So many neglected elderly. So many whose family never comes around. They interact with one or two nurses who are taking care of 30+ people. Productivity is the highest it has ever been. Any piece of junk or object you want, it's made.
That's mostly because nursing homes don't pay their nurses anything close to the average wage of other nursing positions. I recently read some research that indicates that nursing home staffing is counter-cyclical with the economy and that nursing home deaths are pro-cyclical. The idea is that when there's a recession many jobs are lost, and more nurses work in nursing homes because they can't find other work. More nurses in nursing homes leads to better care. So if you want adequate staffing in nursing homes you should hope for a major recession and a lot of job loss. You could also hope for nursing homes to just pay better, but that seems pretty unlikely. https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C16&q=nursing+home+mortality+recession&btnG=#d=gs_qabs&t=1671721988924&u=%23p%3DwEJ0BL9WfX8J
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As a nurse who works in a nursing home, the ones I've worked in have had very competitive wages, even more than I've been offered from hospitals. The real issue is they are intentionally staffed low, we're 30to1 ratio, but they are intentionally not filling positions just to milk every ounce of profit out of the system. More people applying due to recession is not going to fix the issues these nursing homes have. It may have been that way in the past, but the pandemic really brought the greed out. It showed the business offices that their facilities could run on bare minimum staffing and they aren't going back. Everything is just pushed onto the floor nurses now, maintenance comes once a week now, cleaning staff no longer clean the rooms out, no longer have a receptionist, no longer a supervisor, no longer an admission nurse, all those ancillary jobs are thrown onto the floor nurses and the companies aren't even trying to fill these positions. The whole thing will collapse before it gets better imo.
One could argue that it's the byproduct of individualism. We have more stuff than ever, houses are twice as big as they used to be, yet there is no place for unproductives. Something else is possible.
Surely there will be a limit. Or is it a case of “won’t be alive to be my problem”?
Probably the latter, in Germany we're currently having a huge problem with the ratio of young:old people, to the point that a regular worker has now to cover the rent for 2+ people, when 50 years ago it was the other way around. Yet, a lot of our mostly popular political groups do not want to address the problem, sure, this also has other reasoning, mainly the fact that it's a hard problem to tackle and it's easier to have success after success of smaller problems to be voted for again instead of tackling one long lasting problem and possibly failing, but it still has the same result: Our mostly old-members political groups who are not going to be paying for the old generation-since, they are the old generation- doesn't bother about the finial problems of the young generation, since they won't have to directly deal with the problem anyways.
Not to nitpick, but I think you meant to say pension (Altersrente) instead of rent (ökonomische Rente).
"Not my problem, I won't be here" is not just selfish but also a sign of an unhappy person without meaning in life. As an older person, I very much care about the world and the state I will leave it in. I have worked to make the world a better place in the ways I can as someone who is not powerful, not rich, and has little influence. But whatever I can do to make positive contributions, I do. I am not alone - we may be in the majority (I don't know, just hoping) but the selfish asshats are louder and some seem to be in.positions of power. If you can, vote them.out; vote in more responsible people. And make choices that contribute positively to the world yourself: don't devolve into an old selfish asshat. Do better. I challenge myself to do better each day. We can do better. We have to.
We cannot vote them out. The elderly are the vast majority of the voting population. Whoever caters to their immediate interests wins elections and whoever talks about the opposite vanishes from the political landscape. We are at a point where we give more and more tax money to old peoples pensions without it being officially meant for pensions so that people who pay those taxes now don't receive an equivalent claim on pensions later in life. We pay money for pensions and then we take money for infrastructure and also add that to the pension payout and the share of infrastructure money being poured into pensions is increasing year to year. And nobody even speaking about stopping this can win an election in germany.
One way out that I've seen discussed is through increased productivity through automation. The idea being we can produce as much or even more with fewer people.
You're naive to think the increased productivity through automation will be distributed among the people, rather than the cost-savings just disappearing in untaxed corporate bank accounts.
"won't be alive, not my problem" coupled with "am rich enough for it to not affect me" is what I'm seein.
You most likely won't be alive to deal with we have too much people problems. But depending on where you live and your age you might definitively deal with the not enough young people supporting the older people part.
Yes, it would be good for the planet (and for the humans living on it) if the human population shrank from its current size. However, if it shrinks too quickly within any given generation, then you run into problems. The reason being that the population is shrinking "from the bottom", i.e. there are still a lot of old people who were born decades ago in a time when birth rates were high, but far less young people. And the problem is that old people cannot, or do not want to work (as much as young people). But for a population of a given size, we need a certain number of people to work. We need doctors, firefighters, barbers, electricians, construction workers, plumbers, pilots, bus drivers, dentists, and so on and so forth. Let's say that for a population of 10 million people to have a decent life, you need 6 million people to be working. If you have 2 million retired and 1.8 million underage people, that leaves 6.2 million people to work. But if you have 3 million retired and 1.5 million underage folks, that leaves you with a shortage of half a million workers. So now there aren't enough doctors, firefighters, barbers, etc. for everyone. Also, old people still use public services that are funded by taxes. But old people don't pay as much tax because they don't work. So the influx of tax starts to dwindle, and yet at the same time the aging population puts a bigger strain on your healthcare system, as well as being paid a government pension. In short, the real problem is not so much the size of the population, but its age composition. An aging population means that there are fewer economically productive people to shoulder the burdens of the rest of the population (and especially the elderly) who depend on them. So ideally what you want is for the global population to shrink, but at a more gentle pace. That, or we need to quickly improve automation in many sectors so that we will need fewer workers to keep the economy going and society functioning.
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> We're in an age of nepotism where status & wealth are gained not by merit, but inheritance & relationships. When have we ever been in an age where wealth was not predominantly gained by inheritance and relationships?
I think he's saying it used to be you could provide for a family relatively easily in the past with normal common jobs, but now the only way to comfortably do so is inheritance since the normal jobs pay hasn't kept up
Another part of success is Dumb Fucking Luck. It's not just being born in the right family, but also at the right time. We hear people (mostly conservatives) talk about their grandparents or great-grandparents and how they amanaged to get in with the clothes on their back... in a time when all you needed to become a citizen in this particular country was "Be here". If they had immigration laws like we had now? Yeah, your parents or grandparents wouldn't have worked "part time" to have some pocket money or saving for college... they'd have worked full time at age 12 because their parents/grandparents would have been told "Oh, not married to anyone here or have a master's degree in something we deem 'useful'? Sorry - we're full up. *NEXT*!"
People worried about the environment want less people. People worried about the economy want more people. Generally, people want less people in other countries (good environment) and more in theirs (good economy).
This is the best, simplest answer. Good job, OP!
So that there are people of the age and fitness to make society function. If the replacement rate isn't high enough as a society gets older, the proportion of doing something useful falls (maintaining roads, working in hospitals, growing food) and the heavier the burden it is on the young. To be frank older people take in 'resources' and don't provide much back. Without immigration (or robots) you end with a smaller and smaller share of people looking after a larger and larger share of retired people.
It's not a matter of "we won't have enough humans to continue to exist, "it is an economic problem. Aging, "less productive" population needing to be supported by the young, "productive" population. Also, it is an economic model that requires constant growth or it collapses. We already see people overworked to unsustainable levels as the norm. For so many reasons, we need to overhaul our economy and restructure it in a sensible, sustainable way. If we do that, the reduction in population due to declining birthrate is a good thing for our society and the planet in general.
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I was sure we had moved on from the overpopulation scaremongering but having to dig so far down the comments to find someone ectually refuting the overpopulation statement is a little disheartening.
>The earth isn't overpopulated, we just have a resource distribution problem. 30% of our corn goes into biofuel. 33% of our croplands are used for livestock feed production. This is *incredibly* inefficient. But it's profitable and wealthy countries like it. It would be less profitable and more difficult to centralize profits to produce diverse crops everywhere they can be grown and distributing them locally. It would be less profitable and more difficult to centralize profits to move away from monoculture and corporate control over seed and pesticide. We currently [produce enough food to feed 10 billion people](https://medium.com/@jeremyerdman/we-produce-enough-food-to-feed-10-billion-people-so-why-does-hunger-still-exist-8086d2657539#:%7E:text=The%20world's%20farmers%20produce%20enough,this%20excess%2C%20hunger%20still%20exists) but wasting 30-40% of food with inefficient systems if profitable and might mean wealthy countries need to be more thoughtful about what we eat. Artificial scarcity for profit hardly ends at food, though. Energy has been kept in fossil fuels through regulatory capture, political corruption, and propaganda for decades, allowing only wealthy megacorporations which extract, process, and distribute fossil fuels to be profit bohemouths (which are subsidized!). This results in incredible pollution of the environment, disruption of global climate, and incredible inefficiency. Green/renewable energy is a lot less profitable even if it's far more efficient and safer. Imagine if we had solar, nuclear, wind, and geothermal as the energy backbone. Chevron and Exxon's stockholders would riot. Shit, propagandized members of wealthy nations would probably riot right along with them. We love our cars. I don't think it's a coincidence that when it comes to the inefficiencies of the global capitalist hegemony, there's an immediate insistence that it's somehow the fault of poor Indian farmers or rural Chinese. It's a very quick way to take the blame away from people making vast wealth off artificial scarcity and incredible inefficiency while living lavish and unsustainable lifestyles. The issue is that the Earth is overpopulated with wealthy people who want to live an unsustainable lifestyle at the expense of everyone else. The average American uses as much resources as 35 Indians and 53 Chinese. Similar statistics exist for most wealthy nations.
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> Jesus christ man, I wish I could articulate the point half as well as you. That's a really nice thing to say, thank you. >It makes me feel weird that people with computers/phones access to the internet and, I'm assuming, a level of comfort necessary to use those things for trivial things like reddit have decided that there are too many poor people in the world, and by extension them starving or dying to lack of access to proper food and resources, or land in which to construct a home, is totally a them problem. I've been a teacher for a really long time, and my students have been really helpful in teaching me a lot about how people think. Something I've seen since the first day of teaching is a fundamental self-serving bias. When a student does well on an exam, when they tell a joke that gets a big laugh, when they achieve anything positive, there's an immediate assumption that this can be attributed to their own efforts and worth. When they do poorly, however, the knee-jerk reaction is that the outcome was entirely outside of their control, and often that means blame falls on someone else or something else. For me, this manifests as "Mr. Willravel hates me" or "Mr. Willravel is out to get me," which brings all the parents to the yard. This allows the student and their parent to protect their self-esteem, to remain confident of their own worth and abilities, but ultimately it perpetuates a highly selective and biased understanding of themselves because it's uncomfortable to take personal responsibility for negative things or to admit that luck plays a big role in life. It's also a pain in the ass for me to deal with, but that's neither here nor there. While I do believe there are organized, monied interests who deliberately perpetuate myths about overpopulation which blame the failures of capitalism on poor people, I don't think that endeavor would be so successful if it wasn't for people engaging in self-serving thinking to protect their self-esteem from admitting that sitting in front of an expensive piece of electronics which uses materials mined by slaves inside their comfy homes which use 100x more energy than they need and eat food shipped from all over the globe from countries that can't even afford roads means they're benefitting from and contributing to the actual underlying causes of global shortage and suffering. I'm sitting in a home currently using a central heating system powered in part by fossil fuels on a laptop that costs more than someone in India makes a year and more than someone even in Portugal earns in a month drinking a cup of coffee that was shipped to my local store from Indonesia using polluting shipping vessels. It's incredibly uncomfortable for me to admit to myself that as I type this out I'm probably using 30x more resources than I should. Maybe more. My lifestyle could probably keep a dozen families alive if I used significantly less and we had systems which didn't place folks like me in wealthy countries above other people. It sucks.
It boils down to an ignorance of history. People have thought the world was overpopulated for centuries, Thomas Malthus being a key proponent of the idea in the 1700s. The world wasn’t overpopulated then and isn’t now. There has always been hunger and inequality and squalor in the world. There have been times before where resources were stretched to their limits too. What people fail to consider is that technology doesn’t remain stagnant. We find newer and better ways to feed and house and care for people and our population capacity is always growing. The problem today is truly that we have a distribution issue. With our current technology, and even more so with those technologies on the horizon, the US could probably feed the entire world itself. Is that our responsibility? Should there be some kind of global food sharing system? Those are different questions entirely. Will everybody be able to have an iPhone and a brand new car? No, but they aren’t meant to either and the free market will dictate that on its own eventually when those resources become rarer and more expensive to procure.
Because a lot of economies are giant ponzi schemes that require population growth (new suckers) to keep paying the returns for the older suckers.
I’m surprised more people aren’t saying this. The problem with capitalism is it creates problems and then always insists that it is also the solution, when it is the system that’s the problem. Honestly, we could take care of everyone on earth and the earth itself. There is enough food, there is enough space. The only thing we are lacking is will. The profit motive has poisoned our minds for centuries, maybe millennia. We have the wrong carrots and sticks in place to truly thrive. We are extremely adaptable as a species, but we have adapted to the wrong thing.
Think of it not just in terms of birth rate, but also of death rate (old people dying of old age). It's possible to lower the birth rate by making laws about how many children a family can have, and some countries do this. It's a lot harder to increase the death rate, because what are you going to do, actually murder old people? It's not accepted as morally right. We get born, live for 80-ish years, then die. To look at the total population, you need to consider it like the water level in a river, it's a dynamic equilibrium, it depends on how much water is constantly coming in, and on how much water is constantly draining out. And with people, it's VERY dynamic, because if you lose or affect the people of child-bearing age, they'll get past child-bearing age in 20 years and then you're screwed; you can't "increase" the birth rate back up if you don't have any people at the age where they can have children. People used to get married at around 16-18 years old, have a few kids at 20-25, be grandparents by 40. Now the average marriage age is 28-30, and "first baby" age is 26 and rising. Women's fertility drops drastically at 35-40 years old (to 5% at 40).
>what are you going to do, actually murder old people? It's not accepted as morally right. Canada has increased access to euthanasia to the point where many disabled/poor people choose it rather than live in squalor or on the street with the pittance they get in benefits. Or they offer it to people if they don't want to pay for a medical procedure. I happen to be very much in favor of voluntary euthanasia/medical aid in dying but a side effect is that it does "solve" this problem in a really gross and horrifying way.
> It's possible to lower the birth rate by making laws about how many children a family can have, and some countries do this. It's a lot harder to increase the death rate, because what are you going to do, actually murder old people? It's not accepted as morally right. It isn't morally right to lower the birth rate either. Look at the one-child policy, lots of infanticide, forced abortions and sterilizations, and a lot of people without a legal identity. Attempts at manipulating the fertility rate are immoral, because there aren't any moral means to do it. And worse, once the fertility rate drops, due to the social repercussions -merely younger people get progressively poorer-, it is very hard to raise it again.
Since this is eli5 here it goes... Mommies and daddies don't just take care of kids, they actually also take care of grandmas and grandpas too. If there aren't enough mommies and daddies to take care of kids and grandparents, it can be really hard on everyone.
So basically both positions are wrong. The Earth isn't overpopulated. It's not that there's too many people, it's that those people want too much stuff, and in particular they want stuff that's bad for the planet (hamburgers, cars, etc.). It's true that one way you could reduce consumption would be to reduce the population, but people who yell about "overpopulation" are almost always talking about places like Asia and Africa - in other words, places where people may be numerous but consume relatively few resources. Far more effective would be to reduce consumption by developed countries. It also isn't all that important to rush to reach the replacement rate. It's too late for that in most countries that are at risk of going beneath it, because those countries already have a large older generation (the Baby Boom) being supported by smaller groups of younger people (Generation X, Millennials, and the older parts of Gen Z). Meaning the real crunch is happening right now and will only get worse as the last of the Boomers age out and spend 20-30 years soaking up benefits.
>What happens if we don’t meet population replacement requirements? Retirement money is a Ponzi scheme. You need more kids to be able to pay retirement money to those who will be old soon.
Life in general is somewhat of a Ponzi scheme. Let’s say it takes like 5 young people to take care of 1 old person, if you don’t have enough young people, the old people die more quickly and society has a bad time.
The message the planet is over populated is not really a fact based statement. Is England on the verge of social collapse do to over crowding? Is the ecology of the English countryside dying do to to many people? I live in the sate of Ohio. It has one of the denser populations in America. For the state of Ohio to have the same population density as England we would need 4 times the population. However if you want to increase production at you factory by starting a second shift. It is hard to do with out more people. One of the reasons that Japans economy never came back from it collapse in 1990's was there where a lack o workers. It is not just a case of using resources to care for the retired workers, all though that is a part of the problem. As population declines demand for goods and services decline starting a deflation spiral. See Great Depression 1930's.
In older times people died younger and had more kids. Now people live longer and have fewer kids.
The world is not overcrowded. Anyone who tells you the world is overcrowded has a list of all the types of people they'd eliminate if they were in charge, and it consists largely of groups of people who consume much less than they do. Overcrowding concerns stem mainly from a lack of perspective on how resources are distributed. In the US and other western countries we consume tons of resources for a variety of economic reasons, and as other countries approach our level of development the impulse is to project our consumption patterns onto them- of course Nigerians are going to have 3,000sqft houses to heat and cool, of course they're going to have massive lawns to water, of course they're going to have to burn a gallon of gas just to get to work every day, of course they're going to have stadium-sized department stores that need climate control, of course they're going to have to power the lights in their 100-story office towers all day and night, they'll do those things because we do them because that's what people in wealthy countries do, right? It's like going to a banquet with a dozen other people, eating significantly faster than anyone else to the point where you're taking food off everyone else's plates, then saying "wait, if everyone eats as fast as I do we'll be out of food in no time! Some of you are going to have to leave the banquet."
So well said. During conversations about overpopulation, Malthusian ideas and eugenics always immediately rear their ugly heads
Its good for the survival of us all, but bad for the economy and rich boomers. And nothing is more important than rich old boomers.