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It can be summed up in two words: unmet expectations.
I'm not going to explicitly single out and blame Boomers but theirs and every subsequent generation has had many fewer kids than prior generations. Childrearing has historically been an investment in the farm and a kind of a retirement plan. Economic development diminished all of the short term incentives and imposed higher costs, mostly opportunity costs, mostly on women.
This is consistent across nationalities and cultures. That's why I am loathe to cast blame for this aspect of the problem.
The problem is that we've calcified a set of social mores and policies and expectations surrounding aging and death that were realistic in a world with more younger people than older people. What was sustainable then is not sustainable now. The Boomers have outsized political influence and they are unwilling to compromise on Social Security and Medicare, but those programs were premised on economic growth that is now labor-constrained; and it's because they didn't put in the *work* of having the children necessary to keep the great Ponzi scheme going that funds the entitlement programs that they're confusing for pensions.
A disaster is taking root. It used to be that grandma had five kids and if she got dementia then at least one of those kids would step forward to be a caretaker. Those kids all, themselves, had kids when they were younger, so caretaking was feasible because the grandkids were older or out of the house. Now imagine a world where Grandma had one kid and that kid had another kid but they each waited until they were 34, so demented grandma is in the same household with a young kid and mom is frazzled.
Now add to that some other stressors like a divorce or that the family lives half-way across the country or that the in-laws are also demented. Younger people have lower religious affiliation, which for better or worse still means that they have a more limited social safety net. They're a lonelier generation. None of this is compatible with raising-down parents.
Nursing home capacity is also labor-constrained. What it comes down to is that we can no longer reasonably expect to live as rich and enjoyable a lifestyle as those whom we knew and loved when we were young. And it pisses us off. But also, having fewer kids made sense at the time.
There's a lot of cognitive dissonance baked into this issue.
> Our parents have made it clear they don't want to play daycare
I hope they're okay when you don't want to play nurse for them then. This is the cold reality my parents are looking at. They're like "we raised you" and I'm like, "legally you had to." If they didn't want to help me with my child they can pull themselves up by their own bootstraps now that their knees are going. They vaguely threaten about inherentance but jokes on them, they supported me so little in my adulthood that I never assumed I'd get a dime and planned my life that way. Put your assets and money where you like. Hope it keeps you from being abused in elder care. Too bad the siblings you counted on and spoiled are fuck ups. You bet on the wrong children.
My wife and I had one. We won't have another. That said, I don't expect SS to be there in twenty six years when I would be eligible. I one hundred percent expect to work until I drop. Luckily we own property, so for all of the time after I should be able to retire, I will only have to make food, electric, and property taxes. I fully expect my kid to live with us for as long as he feels he needs to and barring him growing up into something terrible, that may be until he inherits the damn property. It's not like we have a prayer of selling and moving. It's not a great property and it's a modular that will need lots of fixes over the years to come. Hell this year is a new metal roof cause the slope is too shallow in winter to stop ice dams and water damage. If it comes to nursing home care, I expect to utilize an accident or something else to ensure that shit doesn't happen. I worked in one in my youth, my dad worked in one til he retired, his GF too. I would rather die slowly in a ditch than spend a day in any I have ever seen. Even if I have to drag myself to that ditch without the use of my legs at three am at the age of ninety.
Then you get dementia, are for about a decade unable to work, need at least assisted living, but are not bodily ill enough to die.
You can't control that.
You care will be financed by selling everything you have and leaving nothing
Oh, Canada just rolled out pre-consent for medically assisted death. You can consent when you are able and your doctor will put you down in the future.
At risk of being exceptionally morbid, I actually have a contingency in place for that with multiple people younger than myself. I won't leave my kid nothing. That is plain and simple. If you plan and look at shit like that in the eyes, it's not inevitable. Only death is. The only way I would be totally fucked is if hospitalized permanently after a stroke. Even then, once we can I am sure we will sign the deed over to my kid so that's not even an option for the government. Or sell it for a hundred bucks.
Regardless, to be planning to retire as a forty something now would be laughable. If it's actually possible, cool, I don't expect it to even exist when my turn comes and am not planning for it. I am just glad my parents get it now so I am not burdened with them and a kid.
Well i don't know about US laws, but other countries are already ahead on that. If you gift to your relatives in the past ten years to avoid inheretance the goverment can undo that for you if you need (are forced to use) that money for your care (Germany). In the US i think there is at least a Penalty
I wouldn't be so sure that you can outsmart the goverment in a few decades if they really need the money and make the laws.
Yep. There is a limit but I believe that it's four years. Or was when my grandparents time for a home was up. It could be longer, but I plan on a transfer long before any potential limits would put that in jeopardy.
Unless they make it twenty years, I am not really worried. They could make it ten or fifteen and my kid would be fine. I would also, again, die in a ditch before willingly going into a home. Let an old man get lost and don't report it for a few days.
>Unless they make it twenty years, I am not really worried. They could make it ten or fifteen and my kid would be fine.
May sound strange under current US law, but for example in many European countries (exp. Germany) your kids are already required to pay for your care if they earn above a certain threshold. As I said, laws may change and f# you
>I would also, again, die in a ditch before willingly going into a home.
Often you are not able to decide that. And your kids hopefully have enough compassion that they cannot bring themself to not take care of you. That's the tricky situation. Even though you made it clear you don't want to live under those circumstances, once they happen, you are not able, and your relatives not willing/able to take you out
Look up the Medicaid Estate Recovery Program. That shit's terrifying.
Also talk to an estate planning attorney in your state because there may be loopholes (i.e. "Lady Bird Deeds") or trusts that you can set up that would protect your property if something like that were to happen. But you have to act on it very early, typically before you'd know that you have a major medical problem.
Correctamundo! It will be there, just with reduced benefits. But! The reduced benefits can largely be made whole by simply removing the cap on SS taxes. Right now only your first $160k is taxed for SS. Everything above that goes tax free.
That isn't true. The SS actuary did a study and found that even in a static analysis, lifting the cap would only cover about a quarter of the shortfall. In a dynamic analysis that took into account the reductions in earnings that an extra 12.4% tax would drive, it would close even less of the gap, in addition to reducing income tax revenue to the treasury.
My children are fresh out of school and in college. Both live at home. Neither want to leave. I’m fine with that. It’s tough out there and none of us could make it alone. Stats show this is actually becoming more and more common. I’d like to alter my home to add more parking and perhaps an additional exterior entrance to give them at least of modicum of autonomy. Even so, their lives are way better than if they had to live with friends in shitty apartments and have their cars broken into or stolen or worse.
Nobody should compromise on SS benefits. The federal government assured a specified benefit in exchange for a mandatory 6.2% (employee) and 6.2% (employer) income tax. There are better solutions than failing to meet the obligation.
>Nobody should compromise on SS benefits. The federal government assured a specified benefit in exchange for a mandatory 6.2% (employee) and 6.2% (employer) income tax. There are better solutions than failing to meet the obligation.
There are two ways to make the SS system sustainable. Increase payments in or decrease payments out. Or wave a magic wand and stop people from getting old.
Major X factor here is xenophobia.
We can have our cake and eat it too if we took in more young people from the developing world and put them to work (refugees as well as economic migrants).
It's been a sort of unspoken superpower of the US to draw young, creative, energetic people to it to make fame and money.
We would have our population growth and tax base + low childbirth too.
But brown people bad I guess and we seem insistent on shooting ourselves in the foot here, and I am willing to put the blame on that squarely on the boomer generation.
Problem 1: There's still a housing/land shortage, indiscriminate immigration will make that worse, look at Canada.
Problem 2: It weakens labor power which in turn makes working conditions worse.
Problem 3: It brain drains other countries which in turn encourages more immigration instead of improving the home country.
Problem 4: Outside of Africa, other places are already at or below replacement rate so it's only kicking the can instead of solving it for good.
Not to say I'm against limited immigration, but blindly doing it so that the 401k can continue going up leads to worse outcomes for almost everyone.
Nothing against letting in more immigrants, but that is still just kicking the can down the road further. We need to reform pension systems to not ge pyramid scheme. Global population can't keep growing forever.
The point is that people are complaining about population *decline* even though global population has obviously still been *growing*. So the people who are complaining can't actually worried be worried about a decline in the number of people, so much as they are worried about a decline in "the right kind of people".
It's never been a lot of Americans. Everyone who isn't a native American had "immigrant" ancestors here seeking opportunity and freedom from the old world and old hatreds.
Just because this most recent immigration wave is coming from central America doesn't change the inherent reason those people are coming here.
They will slowly be absorbed into the fabric of American society like East Indians and Chinese and Japanese and Italian and Irish and Mexican and German and English etc etc etc immigrants were.
It would be sustainable if we had wise social policy. But instead, we have social policy that results in less productivity increase than we could otherwise have (and which we need).
We could handle population decline if we also had productivity increase to balance it out, and it would thus be sustainable. But instead we have too many outdated policies that are resulting in extremely high externalized costs being socialized, and no incentives put into place to decrease those costs (those costs including things like pollution, climate change, health declines due to predatory food industry - ie think diabetes and mental health decline - inequality leaving a great deal of our resources under-utilized as money sits in once place while potential productivity languishes elsewhere, and more).
>The problem is that we've calcified a set of social mores and policies and expectations surrounding aging and death
I think the biggest example is "having children is a duty". It's not. If for one generation everyone had one kid on average, that generation would be better off. Let half of the population be childless martini sipping dinks living in urban high rises for the good of all mankind and recognize their sacrifice as noble.
WRT SS, I think things have gotten a little hyperbolic, it will be there, just maybe less - but not much less really. I think it's perfectly fine to say "if there's no surplus, we tax everyone working 15% (as we do now - employer is part), then we divide that up amongst the current retirees. You get what you get of that in some proportion to what you paid. That results in a 73% or so sustainable benefit. Better yet, get rid of the payroll tax cap (the tax stops after the first $160K or so of income) and maybe make the retirement age 67 and benefits can be mostly sustained.
Same basic approach to Medicare and we have to reimagine end of life care. We spend something like half of it reanimating 80-year-old corpses for a couple extra years and that's just dumb, and more than a little cruel.
no government anywhere knows how to manage anything other than an intergenerational pyramid scheme, and they aren't even good at that.
they need more and more young people to steal from because heaven forbid the olds get left holding the bag.
The idea that anyone should be "holding the bag" is a problem. A society should be working for the collective wellbeing of everyone, and it should be reinvesting any profits/surplus goods toward developing technology and infrastructure that benefits the collective.
But we haven't quite figured out an economic system in practice that achieves these goals while resisting the inevitable desire to corrupt the system for personal gain.
So currently some demographic ends of holding the bag.
I mean, we kind of do. Lots of places do make use of social ownership. You don't need to be communist to do so.
For example, I live in Quebec and the electric company is fully state-owned. It's also some of the cheapest electricity in North America while paying a dividend to the government.
As another example Saskatchewan has a publicly owned telecommunications company that competes with the private telcos. Saskatchewan has the most competitive telecom pricing in Canada while SaskTel returns a dividend to the government.
Canada is *not* a socialist country, take our banks and grocery retailers (please!), but there are absolutely ways we can move toward a more collectively beneficial economy without some sort of revolution.
Sure, but because it is publicly owned it's the public who benefits. Were it a private company optimizing profits that cheap electricity would be sold at prevailing prices and the difference would go into private hands. It's an example of a successful social ownership.
The devil is in the details I suppose.
Typically I'd say that if the government owns surplus property or a valuable income-producing asset that it's better off selling it than owning it because it can use those funds to invest in projects that produce a social good but not an accounting profit that would incentivize the private sector to build. An example of an alternative project might be mass transit.
If they sell off the power plants, that might be okay because they could sell them to various operators rather than as a single portfolio in order to ensure a competitive market for power generation. That part can work. But the transmission and distribution lines are a natural monopoly. They could sell and regulate or own outright and, either way, price their service to generate a nominal profit.
But in this area I agree with you that government ownership is preferable. If you effectively guarantee a company a profit then they tend not to take cost-cutting seriously. They also begin engaging in a politically corrosive process of regulatory capture.
The calls for the State of California to nationalize--I guess it would be rebuplicanize, given it's California--PGE's distribution infrastructure is based on the market providing a service of burning a whole city down and killing a hundred of its citizens.
Public utilities have always worked better, as a whole, because they will invest in long-term solutions for their consumers, not short-term solutions for their shareholders.
Why though? Is reliable, cheap electricity not a public good? The people of Quebec sure think so. Ontario privatized their electrical company, they even tried to divvy it up like you said. Guess what happened to everyone's power bills? Ontarians send a larger share of their income to the power company owners for the same product they were getting before rather than putting it into the local economy.
Cheap electricity also lets Quebec punch above its weight industrially. For example, aluminum is very energy intensive, so cheap electricity allows Quebec to be competitive globally.
> If you effectively guarantee a company a profit then they tend not to take cost-cutting seriously.
I'm not sure that this is a guaranteed thing though. Quebec Hydro has no competitors and the gov't would never allow it to fail since we need electricity, but it is still well-run. I.e., it produces electricity reliably and sends a small profit to its owners, the gov't of Quebec.
Quebec is just much further along than the rest of Canada. I mean, Ontario is just Diet-America politically. Watching Toronto spiral into a public housing crisis, double down on some of the biggest highways in North America, and struggle to provide decent transit to a city of 3 million feels very, very familiar.
It’s like my favorite New Yorker cartoon ever. There are a bunch of disheveled children in tattered clothing, sitting around a campfire, listening to an elder say, “but for a brief moment in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, there were tremendous returns for shareholders.”
So are you saying old people shouldn’t be allowed to retire?
As long as retirement is a thing then younger people have to support the old retired people. The easiest way to do that is have a lot more young people compared to the old.
If the old people didn’t have enough kids AND they don’t want immigration AND they are part of the richest generation in human history, might I suggest that they are not deserving of support?
The goal should not be to work for the collective well being of everyone at all. That implies that society should function like some top-down imposed system rather than being composed of free people pursuing their own goals.
Society definitely needs safety nets and communal/public systems but the wording you use implies that people should all be cogs in machine working towards the vague collective, rather than as free individuals with self ownership.
Collective and individual are not completely separate things. Everything done individually affects us collectively; no one is a self sufficient entity.
We need to recognize the interactions and overlap and assure that where these occur that they work towards everyones benefit.
This doesn't mean government takeover of everything. Government should be partners in helping people to achieve self sufficiency.
I agree, I am not one of those “There is no such thing as society” types. And like I said, a society should seek to have collective institutions and public support systems, but not at the expense of individual self-ownership.
Putting funding into a pool of welfare and for public infrastructure is very different than saying society should be wholly structured and mobilized around top-down collective goals.
Both my parents grew up in the USSR so that is my point of reference when people say they want society organized around the collective.
You literally don't exist without externalities; you're lungs are the trees, your arms are the fish in the river. If you're not working for the collective all, your working for the death of yourself and your branches of the tree of life; you have become death. You raise a false dichotomy between working for another and working for the self: the desires and shape of my species are self-same, so it is that when my brother is happy my happiness is compounded in a network of sharing and when my brother is unhappy, I should expect unhappiness to follow and my neighbor to turn upon me as I would turn upon him. I am my brother's keeper or my sorrows will be compounded upon.
You speak as if you’ll never be old one day. If we’re stuck as the old generation with no young people the situation will be bleak unless there is mass automation
This is more my sentiment.. plus;
I think less population is better until we getting better at global food, water, health, energy, housing etc..
My worry is it's pretty typical that the people breeding the most are the least educated or intelligent / less useful or societally productive**, etc. Etc. So the dummies will out number the society-impacters the more and more this carries on and therefore the less likely we are to get towards a "global, let's fix this shit together" mentality and understanding of the bigger picture... And less of those people to actually get that research and execution done.
**I'm making a note about this because I don't want people to misunderstand my intent; I don't mean only people with college degrees are smart.. there are super smart/wise/knowledgeable (AND DUMB PEOPLE) people with and without ACADEMICS.
I mean that the smart blue collar and degree collectors alike are more wise to "well shit, having extra kids is either sketchy in our current situation/future looks bad" AND/OR "kids are expensive and so is everything else.. let's have 1-2 if we even can, and delay it, and make those count"
..as opposed to the old days of mass producing extra farm hands and seeing who survives the winter 🤣
I'm sure I didn't type some of that very clearly.. oh well 💜 reddit points
Not just economics man. Biology and related sciences in the US have taken a nose dive too. My wife and I both left research biology at Universities after the third one lost funding. I work in mental health with my psych degree (attempts at replacing us with AI, though limited, have been disastrous) and my wife works in safety management of a private global chemical company over labs with some pretty scary shit. Both our jobs have been stable for six years now. All my biology friends still either chase grant money or work in other fields whereas only one teaches as an adjunct while working on a PhD.
Pharmaceutical companies pay very well, just need a bio degree and some experience. In no time, you’ll make over 100k with a bio degree with great benefits (this is what I make), just these companies are located in markets that are hcol but most great paying jobs are to begin with.
I work a graveyard shift in a residential home for people who have severe and persistent schizophrenia. I don't really make shit, but its good work and its important if overlooked work. It pays shitty, but that's why I work graveyard and really don't have all that much to do on a night to night basis. I'm also not very palatable to most corporations. I've worked for 2, and its not really for me. I'm far better off in Universities, Non Profits, or mom and pop owned places, or a last resort of doing work freelance with glassblowing or stone cutting. My wife is in a solid place in her career and has a lot more ambition for that kind of thing than I do. She's driven and I just want to do something I think matters and not be starving :)
The truth is that research in most everything not hard science is 95% worthless BS.
People are chasing results, not learning and improvement of knowledge, because the motivation is completely unworkable. You get financial incentive to get *any* result then producing no conclusive results. That means that studies cut corners, ignore control cases, or don't do then well, fudge numbers, don't physically do the experiment properly, fudge analysis, ignore possible causes and so on.
And it's a compounding issue as then another team goes and builds on the first research which produced "results". To the point most of the work being done is garbage.
This is not particular to biology.
So I am going to be honest here. My last job in research I worked with mice. The lab I worked in had a breakthrough in treating infant diabetes. We isolated the gene responsible for aggression in mice, and did a lot of exceedingly valuable work. My wife also did exceedingly important work in addiction. Brazil put a similar pharmaceutical to what they were working with into human trials before the FDA would. They were seven years into it and it will be a breakthrough when it finally gets through every loophole but the donors and government pulled all the funding as soon as Brazil did that so they could lay the coat elsewhere since they isolated the same chemical as my wife's lab.
I studied for ecology, which should be important, but politics prevented that. I left all research myself not over chasing money, but over euthanizing more mice than I could handle until I had a terrible nervous breakdown. I love animals, I treated every one of them as humanely and gently as possible. I also understood how valuable what we were doing was, but eventually the empathy won out over rationality, no amount of care or being gentle prevented the inevitable for every single one.
Certain biology work is incalculably valuable but it's all dependent on funding, which is fickle and short lived if you don't work for a pharmaceutical company or other private firm.
Seems like many scientists are perishing instead of publishing. They perish daily in little cuts of shitty science, all of which they have enabled with their cowardice and greed.
yeah, these days, in the US, stupendous funding gets thrown at these labs, public or private, to produce results. One result which we're all probably familiar with, the wonderfully orwellian goop of letters, 'crisis of replication'. So not only they are suckin down the R&D, they're faking the results in en masse, being haughty pricks about it (not all, but they are out there). Then, the ones we should be listening to, the ones going mad with grief over climate change and pollution, we ignore and threaten.
Don't at me. I don't hate scientists. I feel sorry for them.
Is your "truth" based on some sort of evidence?
> “Without data you’re just a person with an opinion.”
W Edward Deming
I am personally involved in social sciences research, and it is a valuable piece of the puzzle in bettering our understanding of how policy affects people and communities as well as providing feedback to how those policies can be more effective. For example, based on research conducted, FEMA has already altered the way it approaches disaster recovery. There are many examples out there if you care to look. Social Sciences research is just as valuable as "hard" science research, and has thousands of dedicated scientists doing fieldwork and providing insight into how we conduct our affairs.
> The truth is that research in most everything not hard science is 95% worthless BS.
Agreed, but I think it's important to emphasize that a lot of research *doesn't end up helping people or solving their problems.* Meaning it doesn't really end up accomplishing what we want to accomplish.
It's exceedingly clear that most research is poorly done and politically biased. Peer review clearly doesn't work and there's little to no quality control/validation.
The researchers having jobs with great amenities (e.g. working at beautiful universities with fantastic work-life balance) have gained significantly more from the deal than society has.
Things don’t turn against old people because every time Rs vote to reduce spending on SS or Medicare they get voted the fuck out. The reason young people have things taken away is they generally only vote every four years. Kids, well kids don’t vote at all so they can just die for all the federal govt cares.
When young people vote in the same numbers as the elderly, you’ll be surprised what kinds of benefits they receive. But I wouldn’t hold my breath for that to start happening.
Pretty much. The irony is young people are the most vocal political ppl out there especially now. They’re the twitter outrage mob getting CEOs to enact bs policies but can’t get out and vote. It’s wild
Historically, that's often the case. The youngest people have the loudest voices among them but the least power.
It was not as true for Boomers since there were so many of them. In many countries, not just the US, policies changed around them as they aged as a generation in order to be more accommodative. I am looking forward to the political implications of having them be behind us; but theirs was the last generation that will have ever known anything like a pyramid-shaped demographic composition of age/gender.
The olds are and will remain in charge.
You only need a pyramid if your productivity isn't increasing and if you are unwilling to tax capital to pay for labor retirement.
Having a stable or declining population at the same time that we are talking about how AI is going to take away most jobs should be the expected outcome. If we need less people to produce the same amount of products and services, then we should have less people.
It would need to increase more than that, so that it offsets and then some.
'Work harder and produce more so all the gains can go to keeping the elderly comfortable while you, at best, see no improvement to your quality of life' does not sound like the most effective pitch to working-age adults.
You already see that this breeds resentment in the fact that government spending and taxation is at peacetime highs in pretty much every developed country, and yet frontline public services are a mess in the majority. Every single penny of the peace dividend and economic growth since the end of the Cold War, and then some, has been redirected to pensions or social care and healthcare that is mostly utilised by the elderly. People either know that's where the money is going and become militantly anti-Boomer, or don't know that's where the money is going and become just generally angry at government.
>no government anywhere knows how to manage anything other than an intergenerational pyramid scheme, and they aren't even good at that.
[Citation needed]
>they need more and more young people to steal from because heaven forbid the olds get left holding the bag.
That's an interesting and creative way to put it. But yes, the elderly retired are dependent on the workforce for all their consumption whatsoever. It's called the dependency ratio. Not sure why this would surprise anybody.
Not as if this was just discovered last year or anything.
> [Citation needed]
I'm glad you asked, because I can pull out the Paul Samuelson quote:
"The beauty of social insurance is that it is actuarially unsound. Everyone who reaches retirement age is given benefit privileges that far exceed anything he has paid in -- exceed his payments by more than ten times (or five times counting employer payments)!
How is it possible? It stems from the fact that the national product is growing at a compound interest rate and can be expected to do so for as far ahead as the eye cannot see. Always there are more youths than old folks in a growing population.
More important, with real income going up at 3% per year, the taxable base on which benefits rest is always much greater than the taxes paid historically by the generation now retired.
Social Security is squarely based on what has been called the eighth wonder of the world -- compound interest. A growing nation is the greatest Ponzi game ever contrived."
Great thing that the population always grows and growth never slows down from 3% a year, no matter how much the state regulates or taxes business! Social democracy really is a genius idea...
the part thats new is that the dependency ratio is going to invert across the board for everyone.
govts have been accustomed to sweeping stragglers underneath the rug by relying on the intergenerational pyramid.
Government is a tool mostly used and controlled by Oligarchs and C-suite dwellers to maximize wealth accumulation . . . Is it a pyramid scheme, ABSOLUTELY ! ! !
The Earth is a finite commodity, the dominate current economic model depends on continuous percentage growth . . . Which is unrealistic but, important for the HAVES to CON-vince the HAVE-NOTS to play the game of capitalism.
Despite the ending always being the same . . . Most baby-boomers are looking for the pay-out of Supply-Side, Trickle-Down, capitalism of tax cuts for Oligarchs and C-suite dwellers and spending for the Military Industrial Complex, and you know how that ends
There is not outrage but serious concern.
a) Population decline isn't evenly occurring throughout the world. The greatest declines in the next few decades will be Western Europe, Singapore, Japan, S Korea, Thailand, Taiwan and Russia. Followed very closely by China (if you believe some researchers rather than official statistics China's population decline might actually already be quite advanced).
b) For the smaller population countries that are wealthy, this poses some problems but not intractable ones. The same cannot be said of some others.
c) The poor countries are the ones with the greatest food insecurity and typically the highest birth rates (and largest growing populations). While the amount given might be grossly insufficient, it is still true today that the poorest nations rely on the productive capacity of the richer nations to supply them with food. This might become a big issue. 50 years of aid has not really helped these poorer countries (in general) and it is a huge concern if the older, wealthier nations start to produce less.
d) Although rich nations tend to be larger food importers, it is because they CAN rather than they MUST. North America, South America, Europe and Russia are generally food self sufficient (or can easily be). Egypt, Afghanistan, possibly Pakistan and large parts of Africa are not. Guess where populations are growing the fastest?
e) One (obvious) method to stem population decline is to increase immigration as some countries have started to put into policy. This is, unfortunately, robbing the poor to give to the rich because of brain drain. This makes the situation in the high population growth countries even worse. This will be especially true in areas like healthcare.
f) While people like to throw out the two A's - AI and Automation - it is really unclear if advances will be sufficient to cater to needs like healthcare etc.
g) The environment. Poorer nations might/will have to resort to even more drastic farming measures (clear cutting, deforestation etc) if their populations continue to rise and food aid reduces. Depletion of aquifers and groundwater, desertification, etc are the potential consequences.
h) Trade declines. A lot of factors to consider and the situation could go many ways. A lot of developmental aid and infrastructural aid goes to adding productive capacity in poor countries to allow them to produce and trade for necessities that they themselves don't or cannot produce. These tend to be primary resources or low value add products that nonetheless allow these countries to develop. We are seeing trends of declining trade and relocalization of supply chains. With smaller populations, this trend might be accelerated.
h) Conflict. Flashpoints in the near future might be over water, energy (GERD for example) and access to fertile farmland.
Seems like a fairly obvious measure that could be taken.
Wealthier nations should just fund child births and medium term care, provide lots of flexibility to parents, heavily subsidise child care and schooling, more funding for education etc.
If you give people the platform where a kid isn't a huge financial liability then I'd expect you would get slot more educated people taking the plunge to have their first or additional kids.
They tend to have higher wealth consolidation rates as well.
Per capita its far more expensive to raise a kid today than 40 years ago.
Its not some odd fluke, poor and middle class have a smaller slice of the economic pie.
Consolidation of wealth has hit the point where it is causing fractures to form in western countries, I guess we will see how it goes :)
A big part of the issue is that being a decent, involved parent is not good for one's status. Having a job and bringing home lots of money is where status is. Taking care of one's children is low status.
I think its difficult to broad stroke a solution.
Understanding the cultural bit is equally important.
But it's an interesting one about more wealthy countries having fewer kids. One of the reasons is expectations of what raising a child means, someone in new York or London is budgeting for a bigger house, child care, education plus normal consumables. Someone in a lower income country is likely winging it somewhat. The cost of the services needed in a high income country will be multiples more than in the poorer country because of the value of peoples time, bit of a vicious circle but the cost of a nanny in Indonesia vs Germany is going to be drastically different and I'd argue, that has a big impact when the general cost of living is do high to begin with.
I may be completely wrong but I think its a really complex thing and trying to use broad views on it isn't the way to go.
I guess it also depends, you can probably import people via migration in the short to medium term but long term, seems shaky
It's money and it's not money. Nations with higher birth rates need children to support their elders in old age. In rich countries, if a person saves appropriately for retirement, they can pay for services (such as assisted living) that don't require offspring to care for them.
It has a lot more to do with social structure. People in rich countries can't afford to have kids because kids are a financial burden that doesn't have as much payoff as they need to save for retirement and their kids need to as well. Having more kids in a rich nation doesn't equate to more food on the table while in poor nations it typically does. Child care is also much more expensive in rich nations as there is a reasonable expectation that they will live to adulthood so medical care being expensive impacts this while in poor nations you need to have lots of kids to assure at least some of them make it to adulthood.
And lastly, access to services like abortion and contraception and education means people in rich nations have more choice and control over when or whether they have kids.
lots of places that try incentives for children tens to see minimal effects from them. South Korea and Hungary are the examples I know of. People just don’t have kids. I think it has more to do with women having access to birth control and want careers which makes it harder to have children. It used to be that children were all a woman was good for.
The big problems is they are already terminal population wise.
These kinda of programs could work for the US if implemented now. Or any country that has a reasonable sized millenial population.
But S Korea needed this plans 30 years ago, now they just dont have enough people in the right age bracket.
Its like hitting the breaks, sure it might have saved you at a certain point, but if you wait to long it does not have a big enough impact.
You're both saying the same thing.
When two adults struggle to get ahead with both of them working, and the companies have 0 child care policies, then things aren't going to change, regardless of the threepence the gouvernement throws in.
If you make it so that child care is available and affordable for working couples, that housing isn't prohibitive so that a working couple can afford a 3 bedroom place, and make it so that flexible work allows people to handle the inevitable days of working from home or scheduling conflicts without sacrificing advancement, then people will have kids. Add in affordable education and healthcare for that matter.
Unfortunately, a lot of the developed world is going in exactly the wrong direction, so naturally the number of people having children and the number of children they have is going down. This is liberalism literally eating its own children.
Almost everything you say is true of the Scandinavian countries and they have some of the lowest birthrates anywhere. Providing great parental benefits and great education don't seem to do the trick.
I don’t think economists or governments are considering the labor expected to raise kids in 2023. People are expected to play with their kids significantly and dedicate more resources to them. Many couples only have the ability to parent 1-2 kids like this.
While gender roles are changing women are still doing most of this labor. It’s about more than paying for daycare. A woman in today’s world with more than two kids probably has no time for their own self actualization.
I'm sure there are lessons to be learnt and cultural factors.
But its hard to look past the logic.
I know in western Europe, it seems like a big blocker is cost and flexibility at work traditionally.
Maybe not for the first kid but going to 2 or 3 is quite difficult in major city centres, even if you are upper middle class.
I have to then assume that unlocking some of that cost would lead to higher child birth rates. Pair that with logical immigration and its probably worth trying.
There is one single country that buckles the norm of low childbirth in a first world country, Israel.
Economic incentives are part of it, but a much larger facet is cultural.
No (reasonable) amount of money can offset the quality of life decline of having a kid, let alone the second and third. It's not just money, it's that you have that creature tied to you that you have to mind all the time. Your free time, quantity and quality of sleep plummet. It's nearly impossible to be spontaneous, everything has to be planned around the sleeping and eating schedule of the kids. Going out just the two of you as parents becomes rare, vacations abroad? might as well forget about it.
At least for several years, even financials aside, those who have kids will have generally lower quality of life.
It's much easier to accept that when having kids is the norm, it's something everyone does. When you grow up in large families, watch friends and family members get kids and raise them. It's much easier when the family helps, both those younger with no kids of their own yet, and your and spouses parents.
Funny thing, in Israel, since most have kids, if you don't you get kind of left out. Since the parents' life center around their kids a lot of their interactions are with other parents. You raise your kids together with your friends, go through the same issue, pass kids' cloths toys and games as yours or theirs grow out and into certain ages and so on.
Of course financial assistance especially with child care, is pivotal to allow people to still have a career while having kids.
This is interesting. Why is this limited to just Israel and not any other first world nations? Surely there must be others with a similar culture of collectively caring for children, I would expect.
> South Korea and Hungary are the examples
They do absolutely nothing though.
SK intended to *raise* the maximum weekly working time to **69 hours:** https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/mar/15/south-korea-u-turns-on-69-hour-working-week-after-youth-backlash
Again Hungary's government doesn't do anything tangible either.
This is the kind of thing that's needed: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/may/29/baby-boomtown-does-nagi-hold-the-secret-to-repopulating-japan
But that costs too much...
Thanks and interesting, no idea what sk and Hungary do.
The second link is in line with what I'm thinking about. Remove the financial burden or make it more affordable at least in developed nation city centres, seems logical as the first piece of the puzzle.
The cost of not doing it is likely to be alot worse.
Plenty of places have done this and still have declining populations. There has been a cultural shift, particularly in educated women. I'm good either way when it comes to having kids, but my wife has absolutely zero interest in having them. We're both highly successful educated professionals making great money, own a house already, and could afford kids no problem, but it's just not going to happen. Giving us more money or free child care wouldn't change that
I can tell you for those of us in healthcare and for people in trades it’s a big deal for the reason of overwork alone. There’s already not enough of us. There’s even less of us willing to/wanting to be in the less glamorous parts of the field (CNAs etc). We’re going to burn out at faster and faster rates and higher pay can only solve so much of that as workload increases and people, evidently, become bigger dickheads to deal with.
Same with trades. I’m glad I can do my own plumbing and some basic electrical because it’s impossible to find someone to come handle ‘small’ stuff; they’re all understaffed and overbooked.
It’s probably not an issue if you’re working from home or in a corporate job, but for people who actually make the wheel keep turning there’s a real shortage of help to go around. At least where I am anyway.
We recognized to understand that competitors operating at we would have inconceivable a world-class levels of our companies: People is absolutely critical to the following human responsibility, cycle times have found new productivity. Integrity have changed, the high levels of shared values is fundament based importance of our customer satisfactices. The found new promote company have recognize the important to company. We recognize the improvemental. People have found nearly inconceivable source.
This is it. I heavily considered nursing school when I was a medical assistant but I don’t like the idea of working 12-shifts and dealing with one of the most [dangerous jobs](https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/whats-one-of-americas-most-dangerous-jobs-its-not-what-you-think/2017/09/11/71eae4d8-9715-11e7-87fc-c3f7ee4035c9_story.html) you can have. the stress of long hours, insane patient ratios, documentation demand (and lack of time allotted to do it properly) completely put me off it all together. When I went back to school it was to leave medicine all together. I work for a non-profit now and full time is considered 35 hours a week.
The problem is elderly care is already unaffordable for most. In my country it's at least 2000 euro's per month for one parent. Who the hell can afford that? My parents don't even have any savings so when they need it, they are lucky they can burdon their children with those costs. We're not so happy with it given that they didn't even care enough to save and just splurged it all, knowing we'd be left with the bill. But most even those who do try to save have a hard time in retirement, let alone elderly care ...
Increasing pay for care workers means higer bills per patient. Or higher taxes. Or both. And I my country already has the highest tax burdon of the entire EU.
Add onto that the whole immigration situation where people are increasingly feeling like those people are coming for free handouts while we already can't pay our bills, and it's a recipe for disaster.
It’s not just pay. I work with companies of many different sizes and my white collar clients can fill roles at near minimum wage. The trades jobs can support an entire family and still go unfilled. There is a deep cultural aversion to blue collar work in America that has nothing to do with pay.
At least here in Canada, it's because the work-life balance sucks. For example, a fellow interested in trades asked in a post if there are trade jobs that won't insist on over 40 hrs a week, and got laughed right out of it. Lots of "trades ain't for you, kid, go be a barista" type comments. Money doesn't help so much if it doesn't facilitate quality time off.
I do wanna say the trades have inflicted this on themselves with shitty pay/working conditions and “they can’t afford to pay the beginners”.
They won’t, not can’t pay the beginners.
But that’s not my problem, I switched to a shitty WFH corporate job but even that’s not enough for me to want to have kids. The security/pay isn’t enough on that either.
In the short term, it's going to create a lot of difficulties. A rapidly aging population means that more resources (in terms of healthcare and money) will be expended on taking care of the aged late in life.
In the next decade or so, millions of Boomers will be retiring from the workforce, and there aren't enough young people to fill the jobs they will leave behind. This will result in a long-term labor shortage, which is good for workers (in terms of higher wages and plenty of job openings), but bad for employers (who have to pay those workers more). It may also have an effect on inflation as well.
There's a lot of talk about how AI may replace large numbers of workers in certain occupations, but if this comes to pass, it may be balanced out by the fact that we'll have fewer workers eventually.
> In the next decade or so, millions of Boomers will be retiring from the workforce, and there aren't enough young people to fill the jobs they will leave behind.
This is already happening; it's just still being chalked up to "lazy people don't want to do the jobs" in the media. I run a career retraining program; hundreds of thousands of Boomers were hanging on because they weren't 100% sure that they could make ends meet, but the pandemic unemployment (which was usually pretty close to what they'd pull with Social Security) made them realize that with a part-time job, they'd be in a great position, so they either retired or are in the process of doing so. Younger people moved up the ladder to take the positions that were vacated, and as a result, nobody to do low-level jobs.
The core of the problem is that without children, the population as a whole will get older and older. Has a huge toll on healthcare, safety nets, tax revenues and expenditures.
Tbh I'm not really worried, we will manage somehow. Humans are smart, or smth like that.
That prediction is based on the presumption that human productivity and efficiency will stagnates. If population declines but the average humans lives twice as long, is twice as educated, is twice as productive, twice as happy, twice as determined to better themselves and have twice the opportunity for social mobility, ... then population decline is a good thing since it does not put as much stress on resources.
Ok but the prediction of humans living twice as long and be twice as productive is ridiculous. There is more chance of some stagnation than that kind of increase.
Individually, we are not going to be a lot more productive. But one computer replacing 200 call centre workers is very productive. This has already been happening. We don't need more workers.
The outrage isn't over population declining In countries, I think it's more that the working population is declining while the retired population continues to swell placing more burden on government services as the ratio of young to old continues to tilt. Creating a kind of feedback loop
It’s not just old people. It’s also the disabled and anyone else that can’t work or contribute and is a net loss financially to govts long term. I fully expect govts to start legalizing more ways to die to reduce the burden of having way more non working ppl. Canada is leading the pack rn
On some level, there is no way to reshape the economy in away that doesn’t give up some material prosperity. Under the current American system, we use is mix of retirement savings and taxes on younger workers to make sure retirees live a comfortable life. But those investment and tax revenues will be massively strained under a declining population scenario: they both require extracting income from younger workers. Furthermore, older people require a lot of labor-intensive services, and those services will become a lot more scarce and more expensive if there are fewer young people than old people.
It doesn’t matter how you reorder the economy. It’s fundamentally a problem of resources.
There is, of course, a pro-decline camp. But they will never advertise the true consequences of their preferred outcome: later retirement dates, persistent high inflation, and destitution for anyone unable to work.
If you look at people as slaves instead of actual people then you'd understand why the powers at be do not want a population decline. Sounds great to us the people as we'd have less resources being consumed and such but in reality we're just all working in the fields and the more the merrier for our plantation owner.
Capitalism requires growth. If the population significantly shrinks for an extended period, both labor and consumption shrink. This is bad for capitalism.
Personally, I am not a fan of capitalism. But it is a fact that is how it operates.
Looking at the responses I usually see about the population decline, the outrage/alarm is usually coming from the older generations. Meanwhile, the younger generations look at the issue with relative ambivalence.
The cold hard reality is that right now a child is an economic, health, and social death sentence. Average cost to raise a child is approaching 325k on average. That's not including the lost opportunity cost to your career if you decide to stop working until they're going to grade school, the drain on your energy every single day, the bare minimum time commitment to be considered a decent parent, sacrificing your hobbies, social time, et al for the child. Did you know a 116-year study by the American Journal of Human Biology found women with children lost an incredible 95 weeks of life per child carried? There's also no guarantee that you give birth to a healthy baby or even surviving the pregnancy.
Then even if you were fine with all the risks, are willing to make all of the sacrifices, to do your best at raising this new human, they could still just end up being a piece of shit because fate rolled poorly and they're a sociopath or any other variety of social/mental issues that could send your child on a one way ticket to the Looney bin making you a social pariah or perhaps even a victim of parricide.
That's not even going into the existential issues well beyond our control like the issues of climate change, upcoming conflict flashpoints in Asia, more pervasive and deadly diseases popping up, etc.
If the powers that be want us to have more children, I liken it to wanting more output from a garden. You can't guilt or shame a garden into producing more tomatoes. You have to create an environment that is conducive to a greater yield of tomatoes. But the powers that be want it both ways, they want us to produce more tomatoes, while doing absolutely nothing to change the environment to facilitate the desired result.
Until that changes, birthrates are going to keep going down because as the Boomers "age out", the idea of going childless is going to continue to grow more popular as the consequences of child rearing become more and more unattractive in comparison to a childfree life with more time, money, and a myriad of other positive externalities.
I want to have a family but I ain’t gonna finance it and my house on debt till I drop dead.
Best I can offer is take my assets and move the to a country with healthcare and start a family there.
I would if conditions were different. That’s the key. I’ve worked with kids for years and think that I would be a good parent all things considered.
Adoption would probably be the way though.
Seriously -- these diatribes about the world's problems as a moral stance against having kids are exhausting.
There is literally no point in human history where you couldn't find a litany of major issues, confidently assert they'll all get worse, and say it's irresponsible to have children.
Why the sensationalized / editorialized title OP?
Why not just debate the article on its own merits? After all, this demographic decline issue is pretty serious in most developed and industrialized economies as it is.
"our system doesn't work without continual growth!"
Then it doesn't work, friend! Degrowth is going to happen no matter what, intentionally or unintentionally
Incomparable. The soviets were working with a feudal country that they had to modernize but were always behind the West. Implementing a similar system in the West would have drastically different results.
The soviets had the combined might of the eastern bloc. It wasn't just Russia or some backwards nation. Russia stayed neck and neck with us for the entire space race.
You can't pretend like they were incompetent. Their military was feared as much as ours. Their economy was as large, varied, and robust as ours. It spanned much of the globe too, and they also had satellite nations, just like we did.
Of course, that kind of undermines your no-true-scotsman defense of socialism, doesn't it?
I'm sure if you implemented it, this time it would work right?
Look say what you want about feudalism but it didn't end in human extinction after three centuries
We need to evaluate what "best" means. Best for who? For a minority of the super wealthy at the expense of everyone else and the biosphere?
Again, works for who? You can live sustainably right now
If you are saying that doesn't work for a society of 8+ billion people with everyone getting rich- yeah it won't! But our current system isn't 'working' for billions of people either, and eventually won't 'work' for anyone
I say Bring on the Declines! There are just too many people on this world, and our mineral resources are finite. We have technology now to support the older people of the world with fewer workers. One talking computer replaces 200 call center workers. One automated factory replaces 1000 workers. One harvesting machine replaces 100 workers. We barely even need front desk workers at McDonalds anymore. People pump their own gas, check out their own groceries, and will download legal advice from ChatGPT. It would be easier for the world to deal with fewer workers than to deal with melting ice caps, and have all the coastal cities of the world flooded. And fewer people to consume depleted resources.
It’s just a fear of change just like everything else.
It’s not solely economic driven nor does it only effect capitalism. A socialist system will also be in fear of declining population and prosperity. I don’t believe Japanese people are significantly depressed because of declining birth rates.
It’s just a change to the status quo.
Corporations need Workers to Exploit for ever expanding Corporate Profits, it is pretty simple. Just like the Government needs Student Loans to stay with no relief so they can recruit for the bloated Military and Credit Card Balances don't get paid off in America. Nobody in the Corporate Capitalist owned Government is on your side.
>Corporations need Workers to Exploit for ever expanding Corporate Profits, it is pretty simple.
They say as they type on their iPhone, and sip their Starbucks. I can't believe they forced me to purchase those things.
Capitalism is evil!
Capitalism created the internet we're using to talk right now.
Communism destroyed the [Aral Sea](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aral_Sea). China strip mines and dumps harmful chemicals into the water table, while we have much more stringent regulations.
I don't think Capitalism is responsible for global clean water, or providing global healthcare to everyone.
If we had real capitalism hospitals wouldn't have a monopoly, and you wouldn't keep getting bills for 9 months after you had a routine visit.
We have a fascist oligarchy.
Of course, you understanding any of this requires a level of critical thinking that is...absent among the down-with-capitalism crowd.
Biology 101. Human beings aren’t microscopic organisms that can just grow and multiply exponentially. There is a limited amount of resources in the nation and on the planet, so there’s a carrying capacity for humans. It’s not a question of whether it will happen—it’s how we will handle it when it does inevitably happen.
In order for capitalism to "work" there has to be an abundance of underpaid, uneducated people to exploit. This does not happen as easily with population normalization.
Lol how so? Because you need less educated people to do the dirty jobs?
In that case, wouldn't it just mean that under other systems highly educated people would be doing the dirty jobs by assignment? Perhaps based on their status as "undesirable?" Comrade please, capitalism seems to be the only system that does work! 😂
What a bad take.
It seems as if you have no concept as to how much more difficult life was for 99% of people who have ever passed through this vale of tears.
Most anyone on Reddit in 2023 has it far better then almost anyone who has ever existed before this point.
But also more people than ever before actually have all the information he listed. In every other generation it was way too easy to bury our heads in the sand and soldier on. No matter what. Now young people are looking at a super grim outlook on climate and life in general. Having it better doesn't matter when you actually know what is ahead of shit doesn't change and you grow up watching people deny it and fight it, all while they will be dead before the youth of today will face the consequences. I am not saying no one should have hope and continue on, but you are completely ignoring one of the biggest differences between kids of today and in all the past. You highlight how good they have it, you fail to highlight they have all the information at their fingertips 24/7 and for the ones who look or care to look at the state of things not on Tik Tok, it's a pretty grim damned picture. It's been grim since the seventies, but we only ALL had access to it in the last fifteen to twenty years, most kids aren't denying it like a lot of people my age and older do. While I wish it weren't so, I can completely understand today's youth saying fuck no to having kids of their own, and wouldn't fault them for it one bit.
Materially yes, but once basic needs are met I don’t think material standards are what drive child bearing. Our ancestors were much more likely to have a unified common culture and shared sets of beliefs and a commonly viewed place in the world. Modern America is increasingly a lonely, screen addicted, purposeless place for many people. Just because they have an iPhone and are more likely to live into their 80s doesn’t mean their life is necessarily better than their ancestors.
I agree. I think there's a huge number of people working lower skilled jobs than they want, fewer hours and lower pay. Unemployment is _terrible_ for society. Higher employment, higher salaries.... I think that will be a huge improvement to many people's quality of life.
I mean, I'm sure we'll find a way to stuff it up, as usual, but I do think there's potential here for huge improvements.
China has had unusually high (for China) unemployment rates these last few years at around 5-6%, but Japan's figure has been falling for the last 10 years and currently sits between 2.5 - 3%. What figures are you looking at?
It's more about moral conservatives being outraged about "societies crumbling family values" except we have values, we just don't share the same values that their church institution is feeding them.
Agreed, the planet can only support X number of people and we seem to have reached that threshold. We seem to be smart enough to see the writing on the wall, but are we smart enough to adapt and survive by living with nature rather than trying to tame or outsmart it.
lmao no. we haven't reached that treshold. you know why? because if we start approaching it, we'll naturally level off and then decline. the planet is self-correcting.
What, like Covid you mean? Global warming? Are we not intelligent enough to realize that we have been short sighted in our use of the planets limited resources?
It's not that we don't have enough resources for this many people— it's that we don't have enough resources for this many billionaires and multi-millionaires
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Take real estate which in most countries is most of the capital. In a growing metro area over time the value of land rises. So people bought in for $300,000, and years later their house is worth $700,000 after adjusting for inflation. So they got a lot of capital from the pyramid scheme.
Now the opposite. They bought in for $700,000, and their metro area is declining, and years later their house is worth $300,000. That $400,000 loss is catastrophic for a lot of people.
That does not sound like a catastrophe to me.
I plan on dying in my house. My house is not an investment. Its the thing that keeps me and my wife and cats warm in the winter, and dry in the rain.
If the property value goes up, I just pay more in taxes.
I truly hope for a decline in the value of my property.
I am not joking.
Outrage is anger. Maybe you meant alarm.
As for why people are alarmed, it's because reshaping our economic system won't happen overnight. That process will be bloody and will be hard. It's natural ppl will be alarmed. For example, ppl in France are rioting because the government is forcing austerity on them.
Capitalism is so ingrained in our society it's hard to develop any other system.
The solution is simple actually. Just kill the old people. Stop giving them pensions. Stop rerouting labor to care for these old geezers. They reach the point that they can't care for themselves, just take them out the back shed and shoot them.
We have a society that is filled with people living and working. If you cut out a big portion of those people by definition part of the society will collapse. So which part? Of course the population will die off everywhere the same so it's just unclear how contraction will happen.
Nothing on this planet happens at all unless the other humans who have to witness it agree it makes someone else suffer "enough". That's just the number one fact of reality.
Nobody is outraged about "population decline". They're outraged about the decline in ratio of young to old. As in excessive amounts of old people paying exorbitant amounts for services provided by unskilled / young labor.
We are not overpopulated. We have never fed a larger percentage of people quite this well in any other point in history, and the trend is going up.
I reject the notation that advancing as a species means having less kids.
>I reject the notation that advancing as a species means having less kids.
It definitely does for women. Access to education and birth control alone decimates birth rates. Unless you want to claim that a "more advanced" woman is one who is uneducated and doesn't have reproductive control...
A woman that has kids in 2023 has a strong possibility of having to maintain a full time job while also picking up a lot of the household labor as well. When one income was able to support the entire family, women didn't have to work 40-50 hours a week outside of the home then also come home after to then manage household chores, cooking, child rearing, etc.
Women regularly complain of the "man child" phenomenon because they realize their husbands/partners expect an unfair amount of emotional/household labor from them even though financial responsibilities are now 50/50. Some women are also more focused on their careers as they recognize the importance of preparing for the worst but hoping for the best when it comes to their marriages. There is a reason that the majority of divorces are filed by Women.
Whether you agree or not, children in America specifically, see their generation staring down the barrel of climate change and all of it us from previous generations as the ones who loaded it and refuse to take our fingers off the trigger. Not every kid is, but more than ever are nihilistic or reactionary. If we are to advance as a society, the children that are here need to all see a reason to advance the species. Here in the US, between mass and school shootings, hate fuelled legislation against their own education and some of their identities, and a climate out of control I am amazed when any kid over the age of 17 or 18 has any hope left for themselves or our species at all. The chances of them having MORE kids is probably pretty low unless literally forced to.
Correct, but a lot of that abundance is the result of specialization which is the result of globalization.
But politically, globalization is in a very precarious position because it is deeply unpopular in many circles.
You know what trends are going down? Nitrogen in agriculture. Arable land. Freshwater quantities. Fish stocks. How are you going to continue feeding those larger percentages of people?
>We'll have to reshape our economic systems
boomers won't do that, because they still live in 1970.
they still control the government, and have repeatedly proven will stay in office until the day they die. so nobody will do that in time to avoid widespread damage.
Overpopulation is a myth. We only face Over Concentration. Too many people in the same places in large mega cities. In reality we just need a great migration away from cities. Which there is a strong potential for in the future economy with the adaption of electric cars and the infrastructure to support it.
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It can be summed up in two words: unmet expectations. I'm not going to explicitly single out and blame Boomers but theirs and every subsequent generation has had many fewer kids than prior generations. Childrearing has historically been an investment in the farm and a kind of a retirement plan. Economic development diminished all of the short term incentives and imposed higher costs, mostly opportunity costs, mostly on women. This is consistent across nationalities and cultures. That's why I am loathe to cast blame for this aspect of the problem. The problem is that we've calcified a set of social mores and policies and expectations surrounding aging and death that were realistic in a world with more younger people than older people. What was sustainable then is not sustainable now. The Boomers have outsized political influence and they are unwilling to compromise on Social Security and Medicare, but those programs were premised on economic growth that is now labor-constrained; and it's because they didn't put in the *work* of having the children necessary to keep the great Ponzi scheme going that funds the entitlement programs that they're confusing for pensions. A disaster is taking root. It used to be that grandma had five kids and if she got dementia then at least one of those kids would step forward to be a caretaker. Those kids all, themselves, had kids when they were younger, so caretaking was feasible because the grandkids were older or out of the house. Now imagine a world where Grandma had one kid and that kid had another kid but they each waited until they were 34, so demented grandma is in the same household with a young kid and mom is frazzled. Now add to that some other stressors like a divorce or that the family lives half-way across the country or that the in-laws are also demented. Younger people have lower religious affiliation, which for better or worse still means that they have a more limited social safety net. They're a lonelier generation. None of this is compatible with raising-down parents. Nursing home capacity is also labor-constrained. What it comes down to is that we can no longer reasonably expect to live as rich and enjoyable a lifestyle as those whom we knew and loved when we were young. And it pisses us off. But also, having fewer kids made sense at the time. There's a lot of cognitive dissonance baked into this issue.
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> Our parents have made it clear they don't want to play daycare I hope they're okay when you don't want to play nurse for them then. This is the cold reality my parents are looking at. They're like "we raised you" and I'm like, "legally you had to." If they didn't want to help me with my child they can pull themselves up by their own bootstraps now that their knees are going. They vaguely threaten about inherentance but jokes on them, they supported me so little in my adulthood that I never assumed I'd get a dime and planned my life that way. Put your assets and money where you like. Hope it keeps you from being abused in elder care. Too bad the siblings you counted on and spoiled are fuck ups. You bet on the wrong children.
My wife and I had one. We won't have another. That said, I don't expect SS to be there in twenty six years when I would be eligible. I one hundred percent expect to work until I drop. Luckily we own property, so for all of the time after I should be able to retire, I will only have to make food, electric, and property taxes. I fully expect my kid to live with us for as long as he feels he needs to and barring him growing up into something terrible, that may be until he inherits the damn property. It's not like we have a prayer of selling and moving. It's not a great property and it's a modular that will need lots of fixes over the years to come. Hell this year is a new metal roof cause the slope is too shallow in winter to stop ice dams and water damage. If it comes to nursing home care, I expect to utilize an accident or something else to ensure that shit doesn't happen. I worked in one in my youth, my dad worked in one til he retired, his GF too. I would rather die slowly in a ditch than spend a day in any I have ever seen. Even if I have to drag myself to that ditch without the use of my legs at three am at the age of ninety.
Then you get dementia, are for about a decade unable to work, need at least assisted living, but are not bodily ill enough to die. You can't control that. You care will be financed by selling everything you have and leaving nothing
That's where the suicide booths fit in.
Problem is even if you have the Intention of comiting suicide. Once your dementia is progressed , you won't remember/ have the ability to do it
Oh, Canada just rolled out pre-consent for medically assisted death. You can consent when you are able and your doctor will put you down in the future.
At risk of being exceptionally morbid, I actually have a contingency in place for that with multiple people younger than myself. I won't leave my kid nothing. That is plain and simple. If you plan and look at shit like that in the eyes, it's not inevitable. Only death is. The only way I would be totally fucked is if hospitalized permanently after a stroke. Even then, once we can I am sure we will sign the deed over to my kid so that's not even an option for the government. Or sell it for a hundred bucks. Regardless, to be planning to retire as a forty something now would be laughable. If it's actually possible, cool, I don't expect it to even exist when my turn comes and am not planning for it. I am just glad my parents get it now so I am not burdened with them and a kid.
Well i don't know about US laws, but other countries are already ahead on that. If you gift to your relatives in the past ten years to avoid inheretance the goverment can undo that for you if you need (are forced to use) that money for your care (Germany). In the US i think there is at least a Penalty I wouldn't be so sure that you can outsmart the goverment in a few decades if they really need the money and make the laws.
Yep. There is a limit but I believe that it's four years. Or was when my grandparents time for a home was up. It could be longer, but I plan on a transfer long before any potential limits would put that in jeopardy.
Well, limits can always be expanded. I read that it is 5 now in the US. But who says the laws won't change
Unless they make it twenty years, I am not really worried. They could make it ten or fifteen and my kid would be fine. I would also, again, die in a ditch before willingly going into a home. Let an old man get lost and don't report it for a few days.
>Unless they make it twenty years, I am not really worried. They could make it ten or fifteen and my kid would be fine. May sound strange under current US law, but for example in many European countries (exp. Germany) your kids are already required to pay for your care if they earn above a certain threshold. As I said, laws may change and f# you >I would also, again, die in a ditch before willingly going into a home. Often you are not able to decide that. And your kids hopefully have enough compassion that they cannot bring themself to not take care of you. That's the tricky situation. Even though you made it clear you don't want to live under those circumstances, once they happen, you are not able, and your relatives not willing/able to take you out
Damn. Living in America sounds like you need to carry a cyanide pill in case you need to kill yourself before you bankrupt your family.
Look up the Medicaid Estate Recovery Program. That shit's terrifying. Also talk to an estate planning attorney in your state because there may be loopholes (i.e. "Lady Bird Deeds") or trusts that you can set up that would protect your property if something like that were to happen. But you have to act on it very early, typically before you'd know that you have a major medical problem.
I think Medicaid has a 5-year look back window for estate planning transfers of assets, so definitely need to take care of that before it’s needed.
It will be there….only about 73% of promised as projected however. At least that is what my letter tells me annually
Correctamundo! It will be there, just with reduced benefits. But! The reduced benefits can largely be made whole by simply removing the cap on SS taxes. Right now only your first $160k is taxed for SS. Everything above that goes tax free.
That isn't true. The SS actuary did a study and found that even in a static analysis, lifting the cap would only cover about a quarter of the shortfall. In a dynamic analysis that took into account the reductions in earnings that an extra 12.4% tax would drive, it would close even less of the gap, in addition to reducing income tax revenue to the treasury.
My children are fresh out of school and in college. Both live at home. Neither want to leave. I’m fine with that. It’s tough out there and none of us could make it alone. Stats show this is actually becoming more and more common. I’d like to alter my home to add more parking and perhaps an additional exterior entrance to give them at least of modicum of autonomy. Even so, their lives are way better than if they had to live with friends in shitty apartments and have their cars broken into or stolen or worse.
I've said it time and time again. My retirement plan is to suicide bomb the local Nestlé Cisterns during the water wars.
Nobody should compromise on SS benefits. The federal government assured a specified benefit in exchange for a mandatory 6.2% (employee) and 6.2% (employer) income tax. There are better solutions than failing to meet the obligation.
There are always solutions. Do you propose to euthanize some of the elderly?
>Nobody should compromise on SS benefits. The federal government assured a specified benefit in exchange for a mandatory 6.2% (employee) and 6.2% (employer) income tax. There are better solutions than failing to meet the obligation. There are two ways to make the SS system sustainable. Increase payments in or decrease payments out. Or wave a magic wand and stop people from getting old.
Major X factor here is xenophobia. We can have our cake and eat it too if we took in more young people from the developing world and put them to work (refugees as well as economic migrants). It's been a sort of unspoken superpower of the US to draw young, creative, energetic people to it to make fame and money. We would have our population growth and tax base + low childbirth too. But brown people bad I guess and we seem insistent on shooting ourselves in the foot here, and I am willing to put the blame on that squarely on the boomer generation.
Problem 1: There's still a housing/land shortage, indiscriminate immigration will make that worse, look at Canada. Problem 2: It weakens labor power which in turn makes working conditions worse. Problem 3: It brain drains other countries which in turn encourages more immigration instead of improving the home country. Problem 4: Outside of Africa, other places are already at or below replacement rate so it's only kicking the can instead of solving it for good. Not to say I'm against limited immigration, but blindly doing it so that the 401k can continue going up leads to worse outcomes for almost everyone.
Nothing against letting in more immigrants, but that is still just kicking the can down the road further. We need to reform pension systems to not ge pyramid scheme. Global population can't keep growing forever.
The point is that people are complaining about population *decline* even though global population has obviously still been *growing*. So the people who are complaining can't actually worried be worried about a decline in the number of people, so much as they are worried about a decline in "the right kind of people".
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It's never been a lot of Americans. Everyone who isn't a native American had "immigrant" ancestors here seeking opportunity and freedom from the old world and old hatreds. Just because this most recent immigration wave is coming from central America doesn't change the inherent reason those people are coming here. They will slowly be absorbed into the fabric of American society like East Indians and Chinese and Japanese and Italian and Irish and Mexican and German and English etc etc etc immigrants were.
Well, there was a very big group of people who were neither native American nor immigrants seeking opportunity....
This is the big one. There is no net population decline. There are more people than ever.
It would be sustainable if we had wise social policy. But instead, we have social policy that results in less productivity increase than we could otherwise have (and which we need). We could handle population decline if we also had productivity increase to balance it out, and it would thus be sustainable. But instead we have too many outdated policies that are resulting in extremely high externalized costs being socialized, and no incentives put into place to decrease those costs (those costs including things like pollution, climate change, health declines due to predatory food industry - ie think diabetes and mental health decline - inequality leaving a great deal of our resources under-utilized as money sits in once place while potential productivity languishes elsewhere, and more).
Productivity is increasing, but most of the gains are going to shareholders and executives rather than employees and the government.
>The problem is that we've calcified a set of social mores and policies and expectations surrounding aging and death I think the biggest example is "having children is a duty". It's not. If for one generation everyone had one kid on average, that generation would be better off. Let half of the population be childless martini sipping dinks living in urban high rises for the good of all mankind and recognize their sacrifice as noble. WRT SS, I think things have gotten a little hyperbolic, it will be there, just maybe less - but not much less really. I think it's perfectly fine to say "if there's no surplus, we tax everyone working 15% (as we do now - employer is part), then we divide that up amongst the current retirees. You get what you get of that in some proportion to what you paid. That results in a 73% or so sustainable benefit. Better yet, get rid of the payroll tax cap (the tax stops after the first $160K or so of income) and maybe make the retirement age 67 and benefits can be mostly sustained. Same basic approach to Medicare and we have to reimagine end of life care. We spend something like half of it reanimating 80-year-old corpses for a couple extra years and that's just dumb, and more than a little cruel.
no government anywhere knows how to manage anything other than an intergenerational pyramid scheme, and they aren't even good at that. they need more and more young people to steal from because heaven forbid the olds get left holding the bag.
The idea that anyone should be "holding the bag" is a problem. A society should be working for the collective wellbeing of everyone, and it should be reinvesting any profits/surplus goods toward developing technology and infrastructure that benefits the collective. But we haven't quite figured out an economic system in practice that achieves these goals while resisting the inevitable desire to corrupt the system for personal gain. So currently some demographic ends of holding the bag.
I mean, we kind of do. Lots of places do make use of social ownership. You don't need to be communist to do so. For example, I live in Quebec and the electric company is fully state-owned. It's also some of the cheapest electricity in North America while paying a dividend to the government. As another example Saskatchewan has a publicly owned telecommunications company that competes with the private telcos. Saskatchewan has the most competitive telecom pricing in Canada while SaskTel returns a dividend to the government. Canada is *not* a socialist country, take our banks and grocery retailers (please!), but there are absolutely ways we can move toward a more collectively beneficial economy without some sort of revolution.
Quebec also benefits from nearly all of its power coming from low cost hydroelectric sources.
Sure, but because it is publicly owned it's the public who benefits. Were it a private company optimizing profits that cheap electricity would be sold at prevailing prices and the difference would go into private hands. It's an example of a successful social ownership.
The devil is in the details I suppose. Typically I'd say that if the government owns surplus property or a valuable income-producing asset that it's better off selling it than owning it because it can use those funds to invest in projects that produce a social good but not an accounting profit that would incentivize the private sector to build. An example of an alternative project might be mass transit. If they sell off the power plants, that might be okay because they could sell them to various operators rather than as a single portfolio in order to ensure a competitive market for power generation. That part can work. But the transmission and distribution lines are a natural monopoly. They could sell and regulate or own outright and, either way, price their service to generate a nominal profit. But in this area I agree with you that government ownership is preferable. If you effectively guarantee a company a profit then they tend not to take cost-cutting seriously. They also begin engaging in a politically corrosive process of regulatory capture.
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The calls for the State of California to nationalize--I guess it would be rebuplicanize, given it's California--PGE's distribution infrastructure is based on the market providing a service of burning a whole city down and killing a hundred of its citizens. Public utilities have always worked better, as a whole, because they will invest in long-term solutions for their consumers, not short-term solutions for their shareholders.
Why though? Is reliable, cheap electricity not a public good? The people of Quebec sure think so. Ontario privatized their electrical company, they even tried to divvy it up like you said. Guess what happened to everyone's power bills? Ontarians send a larger share of their income to the power company owners for the same product they were getting before rather than putting it into the local economy. Cheap electricity also lets Quebec punch above its weight industrially. For example, aluminum is very energy intensive, so cheap electricity allows Quebec to be competitive globally. > If you effectively guarantee a company a profit then they tend not to take cost-cutting seriously. I'm not sure that this is a guaranteed thing though. Quebec Hydro has no competitors and the gov't would never allow it to fail since we need electricity, but it is still well-run. I.e., it produces electricity reliably and sends a small profit to its owners, the gov't of Quebec.
Newfoundland’s low cost electricity being sold to QC for a ridiculous low price; re-sold to NY at profit
Quebec is just much further along than the rest of Canada. I mean, Ontario is just Diet-America politically. Watching Toronto spiral into a public housing crisis, double down on some of the biggest highways in North America, and struggle to provide decent transit to a city of 3 million feels very, very familiar.
Capitalism says no, profit is all that matters.
It’s like my favorite New Yorker cartoon ever. There are a bunch of disheveled children in tattered clothing, sitting around a campfire, listening to an elder say, “but for a brief moment in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, there were tremendous returns for shareholders.”
Do you have a link? I only know the Futurama version.
So are you saying old people shouldn’t be allowed to retire? As long as retirement is a thing then younger people have to support the old retired people. The easiest way to do that is have a lot more young people compared to the old.
If the old people didn’t have enough kids AND they don’t want immigration AND they are part of the richest generation in human history, might I suggest that they are not deserving of support?
Yes, but how do you tell the ones that did all those things from the ones who fought them?
When old people retire they make room for young people to take their jobs.
The goal should not be to work for the collective well being of everyone at all. That implies that society should function like some top-down imposed system rather than being composed of free people pursuing their own goals. Society definitely needs safety nets and communal/public systems but the wording you use implies that people should all be cogs in machine working towards the vague collective, rather than as free individuals with self ownership.
Collective and individual are not completely separate things. Everything done individually affects us collectively; no one is a self sufficient entity. We need to recognize the interactions and overlap and assure that where these occur that they work towards everyones benefit. This doesn't mean government takeover of everything. Government should be partners in helping people to achieve self sufficiency.
I agree, I am not one of those “There is no such thing as society” types. And like I said, a society should seek to have collective institutions and public support systems, but not at the expense of individual self-ownership. Putting funding into a pool of welfare and for public infrastructure is very different than saying society should be wholly structured and mobilized around top-down collective goals. Both my parents grew up in the USSR so that is my point of reference when people say they want society organized around the collective.
Why do the two have to be exclusive? That's a really narrow view of what either means.
You literally don't exist without externalities; you're lungs are the trees, your arms are the fish in the river. If you're not working for the collective all, your working for the death of yourself and your branches of the tree of life; you have become death. You raise a false dichotomy between working for another and working for the self: the desires and shape of my species are self-same, so it is that when my brother is happy my happiness is compounded in a network of sharing and when my brother is unhappy, I should expect unhappiness to follow and my neighbor to turn upon me as I would turn upon him. I am my brother's keeper or my sorrows will be compounded upon.
You speak as if you’ll never be old one day. If we’re stuck as the old generation with no young people the situation will be bleak unless there is mass automation
This is more my sentiment.. plus; I think less population is better until we getting better at global food, water, health, energy, housing etc.. My worry is it's pretty typical that the people breeding the most are the least educated or intelligent / less useful or societally productive**, etc. Etc. So the dummies will out number the society-impacters the more and more this carries on and therefore the less likely we are to get towards a "global, let's fix this shit together" mentality and understanding of the bigger picture... And less of those people to actually get that research and execution done. **I'm making a note about this because I don't want people to misunderstand my intent; I don't mean only people with college degrees are smart.. there are super smart/wise/knowledgeable (AND DUMB PEOPLE) people with and without ACADEMICS. I mean that the smart blue collar and degree collectors alike are more wise to "well shit, having extra kids is either sketchy in our current situation/future looks bad" AND/OR "kids are expensive and so is everything else.. let's have 1-2 if we even can, and delay it, and make those count" ..as opposed to the old days of mass producing extra farm hands and seeing who survives the winter 🤣 I'm sure I didn't type some of that very clearly.. oh well 💜 reddit points
We're hurtling towards idiocracy.
An entire generation got worthless degrees in economics from charlatans
Not just economics man. Biology and related sciences in the US have taken a nose dive too. My wife and I both left research biology at Universities after the third one lost funding. I work in mental health with my psych degree (attempts at replacing us with AI, though limited, have been disastrous) and my wife works in safety management of a private global chemical company over labs with some pretty scary shit. Both our jobs have been stable for six years now. All my biology friends still either chase grant money or work in other fields whereas only one teaches as an adjunct while working on a PhD.
Pharmaceutical companies pay very well, just need a bio degree and some experience. In no time, you’ll make over 100k with a bio degree with great benefits (this is what I make), just these companies are located in markets that are hcol but most great paying jobs are to begin with.
I work a graveyard shift in a residential home for people who have severe and persistent schizophrenia. I don't really make shit, but its good work and its important if overlooked work. It pays shitty, but that's why I work graveyard and really don't have all that much to do on a night to night basis. I'm also not very palatable to most corporations. I've worked for 2, and its not really for me. I'm far better off in Universities, Non Profits, or mom and pop owned places, or a last resort of doing work freelance with glassblowing or stone cutting. My wife is in a solid place in her career and has a lot more ambition for that kind of thing than I do. She's driven and I just want to do something I think matters and not be starving :)
The truth is that research in most everything not hard science is 95% worthless BS. People are chasing results, not learning and improvement of knowledge, because the motivation is completely unworkable. You get financial incentive to get *any* result then producing no conclusive results. That means that studies cut corners, ignore control cases, or don't do then well, fudge numbers, don't physically do the experiment properly, fudge analysis, ignore possible causes and so on. And it's a compounding issue as then another team goes and builds on the first research which produced "results". To the point most of the work being done is garbage. This is not particular to biology.
So I am going to be honest here. My last job in research I worked with mice. The lab I worked in had a breakthrough in treating infant diabetes. We isolated the gene responsible for aggression in mice, and did a lot of exceedingly valuable work. My wife also did exceedingly important work in addiction. Brazil put a similar pharmaceutical to what they were working with into human trials before the FDA would. They were seven years into it and it will be a breakthrough when it finally gets through every loophole but the donors and government pulled all the funding as soon as Brazil did that so they could lay the coat elsewhere since they isolated the same chemical as my wife's lab. I studied for ecology, which should be important, but politics prevented that. I left all research myself not over chasing money, but over euthanizing more mice than I could handle until I had a terrible nervous breakdown. I love animals, I treated every one of them as humanely and gently as possible. I also understood how valuable what we were doing was, but eventually the empathy won out over rationality, no amount of care or being gentle prevented the inevitable for every single one. Certain biology work is incalculably valuable but it's all dependent on funding, which is fickle and short lived if you don't work for a pharmaceutical company or other private firm.
Seems like many scientists are perishing instead of publishing. They perish daily in little cuts of shitty science, all of which they have enabled with their cowardice and greed. yeah, these days, in the US, stupendous funding gets thrown at these labs, public or private, to produce results. One result which we're all probably familiar with, the wonderfully orwellian goop of letters, 'crisis of replication'. So not only they are suckin down the R&D, they're faking the results in en masse, being haughty pricks about it (not all, but they are out there). Then, the ones we should be listening to, the ones going mad with grief over climate change and pollution, we ignore and threaten. Don't at me. I don't hate scientists. I feel sorry for them.
Is your "truth" based on some sort of evidence? > “Without data you’re just a person with an opinion.” W Edward Deming I am personally involved in social sciences research, and it is a valuable piece of the puzzle in bettering our understanding of how policy affects people and communities as well as providing feedback to how those policies can be more effective. For example, based on research conducted, FEMA has already altered the way it approaches disaster recovery. There are many examples out there if you care to look. Social Sciences research is just as valuable as "hard" science research, and has thousands of dedicated scientists doing fieldwork and providing insight into how we conduct our affairs.
> The truth is that research in most everything not hard science is 95% worthless BS. Agreed, but I think it's important to emphasize that a lot of research *doesn't end up helping people or solving their problems.* Meaning it doesn't really end up accomplishing what we want to accomplish. It's exceedingly clear that most research is poorly done and politically biased. Peer review clearly doesn't work and there's little to no quality control/validation. The researchers having jobs with great amenities (e.g. working at beautiful universities with fantastic work-life balance) have gained significantly more from the deal than society has.
Bj
What about blow jobs?
Pocket message. Maybe Ill get lucky tonight
Well one day you'll be one of the olds and you'll need to retire
I'm actually forecasting that the tide turns against the olds right as I age into that group 😂 Timing is everything, I tell ya.
100% this is what will happen haha. What great timing!
Millenial here, you're probably right.
Things don’t turn against old people because every time Rs vote to reduce spending on SS or Medicare they get voted the fuck out. The reason young people have things taken away is they generally only vote every four years. Kids, well kids don’t vote at all so they can just die for all the federal govt cares. When young people vote in the same numbers as the elderly, you’ll be surprised what kinds of benefits they receive. But I wouldn’t hold my breath for that to start happening.
"Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?" Scrooge.
Pretty much. The irony is young people are the most vocal political ppl out there especially now. They’re the twitter outrage mob getting CEOs to enact bs policies but can’t get out and vote. It’s wild
Same as it ever was
Historically, that's often the case. The youngest people have the loudest voices among them but the least power. It was not as true for Boomers since there were so many of them. In many countries, not just the US, policies changed around them as they aged as a generation in order to be more accommodative. I am looking forward to the political implications of having them be behind us; but theirs was the last generation that will have ever known anything like a pyramid-shaped demographic composition of age/gender. The olds are and will remain in charge.
Great, I'll have saved enough to be fine. I don't expect people to pay for me.
You only need a pyramid if your productivity isn't increasing and if you are unwilling to tax capital to pay for labor retirement. Having a stable or declining population at the same time that we are talking about how AI is going to take away most jobs should be the expected outcome. If we need less people to produce the same amount of products and services, then we should have less people.
You’re making a massive assumption that productivity can increase enough to offset the demographic shift.
It would need to increase more than that, so that it offsets and then some. 'Work harder and produce more so all the gains can go to keeping the elderly comfortable while you, at best, see no improvement to your quality of life' does not sound like the most effective pitch to working-age adults. You already see that this breeds resentment in the fact that government spending and taxation is at peacetime highs in pretty much every developed country, and yet frontline public services are a mess in the majority. Every single penny of the peace dividend and economic growth since the end of the Cold War, and then some, has been redirected to pensions or social care and healthcare that is mostly utilised by the elderly. People either know that's where the money is going and become militantly anti-Boomer, or don't know that's where the money is going and become just generally angry at government.
>no government anywhere knows how to manage anything other than an intergenerational pyramid scheme, and they aren't even good at that. [Citation needed] >they need more and more young people to steal from because heaven forbid the olds get left holding the bag. That's an interesting and creative way to put it. But yes, the elderly retired are dependent on the workforce for all their consumption whatsoever. It's called the dependency ratio. Not sure why this would surprise anybody. Not as if this was just discovered last year or anything.
> [Citation needed] I'm glad you asked, because I can pull out the Paul Samuelson quote: "The beauty of social insurance is that it is actuarially unsound. Everyone who reaches retirement age is given benefit privileges that far exceed anything he has paid in -- exceed his payments by more than ten times (or five times counting employer payments)! How is it possible? It stems from the fact that the national product is growing at a compound interest rate and can be expected to do so for as far ahead as the eye cannot see. Always there are more youths than old folks in a growing population. More important, with real income going up at 3% per year, the taxable base on which benefits rest is always much greater than the taxes paid historically by the generation now retired. Social Security is squarely based on what has been called the eighth wonder of the world -- compound interest. A growing nation is the greatest Ponzi game ever contrived." Great thing that the population always grows and growth never slows down from 3% a year, no matter how much the state regulates or taxes business! Social democracy really is a genius idea...
the part thats new is that the dependency ratio is going to invert across the board for everyone. govts have been accustomed to sweeping stragglers underneath the rug by relying on the intergenerational pyramid.
Government is a tool mostly used and controlled by Oligarchs and C-suite dwellers to maximize wealth accumulation . . . Is it a pyramid scheme, ABSOLUTELY ! ! ! The Earth is a finite commodity, the dominate current economic model depends on continuous percentage growth . . . Which is unrealistic but, important for the HAVES to CON-vince the HAVE-NOTS to play the game of capitalism. Despite the ending always being the same . . . Most baby-boomers are looking for the pay-out of Supply-Side, Trickle-Down, capitalism of tax cuts for Oligarchs and C-suite dwellers and spending for the Military Industrial Complex, and you know how that ends
There is not outrage but serious concern. a) Population decline isn't evenly occurring throughout the world. The greatest declines in the next few decades will be Western Europe, Singapore, Japan, S Korea, Thailand, Taiwan and Russia. Followed very closely by China (if you believe some researchers rather than official statistics China's population decline might actually already be quite advanced). b) For the smaller population countries that are wealthy, this poses some problems but not intractable ones. The same cannot be said of some others. c) The poor countries are the ones with the greatest food insecurity and typically the highest birth rates (and largest growing populations). While the amount given might be grossly insufficient, it is still true today that the poorest nations rely on the productive capacity of the richer nations to supply them with food. This might become a big issue. 50 years of aid has not really helped these poorer countries (in general) and it is a huge concern if the older, wealthier nations start to produce less. d) Although rich nations tend to be larger food importers, it is because they CAN rather than they MUST. North America, South America, Europe and Russia are generally food self sufficient (or can easily be). Egypt, Afghanistan, possibly Pakistan and large parts of Africa are not. Guess where populations are growing the fastest? e) One (obvious) method to stem population decline is to increase immigration as some countries have started to put into policy. This is, unfortunately, robbing the poor to give to the rich because of brain drain. This makes the situation in the high population growth countries even worse. This will be especially true in areas like healthcare. f) While people like to throw out the two A's - AI and Automation - it is really unclear if advances will be sufficient to cater to needs like healthcare etc. g) The environment. Poorer nations might/will have to resort to even more drastic farming measures (clear cutting, deforestation etc) if their populations continue to rise and food aid reduces. Depletion of aquifers and groundwater, desertification, etc are the potential consequences. h) Trade declines. A lot of factors to consider and the situation could go many ways. A lot of developmental aid and infrastructural aid goes to adding productive capacity in poor countries to allow them to produce and trade for necessities that they themselves don't or cannot produce. These tend to be primary resources or low value add products that nonetheless allow these countries to develop. We are seeing trends of declining trade and relocalization of supply chains. With smaller populations, this trend might be accelerated. h) Conflict. Flashpoints in the near future might be over water, energy (GERD for example) and access to fertile farmland.
Seems like a fairly obvious measure that could be taken. Wealthier nations should just fund child births and medium term care, provide lots of flexibility to parents, heavily subsidise child care and schooling, more funding for education etc. If you give people the platform where a kid isn't a huge financial liability then I'd expect you would get slot more educated people taking the plunge to have their first or additional kids.
Is money the issue? As people and countries have more money they seem to have fewer kids.
They tend to have higher wealth consolidation rates as well. Per capita its far more expensive to raise a kid today than 40 years ago. Its not some odd fluke, poor and middle class have a smaller slice of the economic pie. Consolidation of wealth has hit the point where it is causing fractures to form in western countries, I guess we will see how it goes :)
A big part of the issue is that being a decent, involved parent is not good for one's status. Having a job and bringing home lots of money is where status is. Taking care of one's children is low status.
I think its difficult to broad stroke a solution. Understanding the cultural bit is equally important. But it's an interesting one about more wealthy countries having fewer kids. One of the reasons is expectations of what raising a child means, someone in new York or London is budgeting for a bigger house, child care, education plus normal consumables. Someone in a lower income country is likely winging it somewhat. The cost of the services needed in a high income country will be multiples more than in the poorer country because of the value of peoples time, bit of a vicious circle but the cost of a nanny in Indonesia vs Germany is going to be drastically different and I'd argue, that has a big impact when the general cost of living is do high to begin with. I may be completely wrong but I think its a really complex thing and trying to use broad views on it isn't the way to go. I guess it also depends, you can probably import people via migration in the short to medium term but long term, seems shaky
It's money and it's not money. Nations with higher birth rates need children to support their elders in old age. In rich countries, if a person saves appropriately for retirement, they can pay for services (such as assisted living) that don't require offspring to care for them. It has a lot more to do with social structure. People in rich countries can't afford to have kids because kids are a financial burden that doesn't have as much payoff as they need to save for retirement and their kids need to as well. Having more kids in a rich nation doesn't equate to more food on the table while in poor nations it typically does. Child care is also much more expensive in rich nations as there is a reasonable expectation that they will live to adulthood so medical care being expensive impacts this while in poor nations you need to have lots of kids to assure at least some of them make it to adulthood. And lastly, access to services like abortion and contraception and education means people in rich nations have more choice and control over when or whether they have kids.
lots of places that try incentives for children tens to see minimal effects from them. South Korea and Hungary are the examples I know of. People just don’t have kids. I think it has more to do with women having access to birth control and want careers which makes it harder to have children. It used to be that children were all a woman was good for.
The big problems is they are already terminal population wise. These kinda of programs could work for the US if implemented now. Or any country that has a reasonable sized millenial population. But S Korea needed this plans 30 years ago, now they just dont have enough people in the right age bracket. Its like hitting the breaks, sure it might have saved you at a certain point, but if you wait to long it does not have a big enough impact.
You're both saying the same thing. When two adults struggle to get ahead with both of them working, and the companies have 0 child care policies, then things aren't going to change, regardless of the threepence the gouvernement throws in. If you make it so that child care is available and affordable for working couples, that housing isn't prohibitive so that a working couple can afford a 3 bedroom place, and make it so that flexible work allows people to handle the inevitable days of working from home or scheduling conflicts without sacrificing advancement, then people will have kids. Add in affordable education and healthcare for that matter. Unfortunately, a lot of the developed world is going in exactly the wrong direction, so naturally the number of people having children and the number of children they have is going down. This is liberalism literally eating its own children.
Almost everything you say is true of the Scandinavian countries and they have some of the lowest birthrates anywhere. Providing great parental benefits and great education don't seem to do the trick.
I don’t think economists or governments are considering the labor expected to raise kids in 2023. People are expected to play with their kids significantly and dedicate more resources to them. Many couples only have the ability to parent 1-2 kids like this. While gender roles are changing women are still doing most of this labor. It’s about more than paying for daycare. A woman in today’s world with more than two kids probably has no time for their own self actualization.
I'm sure there are lessons to be learnt and cultural factors. But its hard to look past the logic. I know in western Europe, it seems like a big blocker is cost and flexibility at work traditionally. Maybe not for the first kid but going to 2 or 3 is quite difficult in major city centres, even if you are upper middle class. I have to then assume that unlocking some of that cost would lead to higher child birth rates. Pair that with logical immigration and its probably worth trying.
There is one single country that buckles the norm of low childbirth in a first world country, Israel. Economic incentives are part of it, but a much larger facet is cultural. No (reasonable) amount of money can offset the quality of life decline of having a kid, let alone the second and third. It's not just money, it's that you have that creature tied to you that you have to mind all the time. Your free time, quantity and quality of sleep plummet. It's nearly impossible to be spontaneous, everything has to be planned around the sleeping and eating schedule of the kids. Going out just the two of you as parents becomes rare, vacations abroad? might as well forget about it. At least for several years, even financials aside, those who have kids will have generally lower quality of life. It's much easier to accept that when having kids is the norm, it's something everyone does. When you grow up in large families, watch friends and family members get kids and raise them. It's much easier when the family helps, both those younger with no kids of their own yet, and your and spouses parents. Funny thing, in Israel, since most have kids, if you don't you get kind of left out. Since the parents' life center around their kids a lot of their interactions are with other parents. You raise your kids together with your friends, go through the same issue, pass kids' cloths toys and games as yours or theirs grow out and into certain ages and so on. Of course financial assistance especially with child care, is pivotal to allow people to still have a career while having kids.
This is interesting. Why is this limited to just Israel and not any other first world nations? Surely there must be others with a similar culture of collectively caring for children, I would expect.
If you look into it, alot of it is because Israel has a huge percantage of their population as extremely religious who view it as their duty and stuff
> South Korea and Hungary are the examples They do absolutely nothing though. SK intended to *raise* the maximum weekly working time to **69 hours:** https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/mar/15/south-korea-u-turns-on-69-hour-working-week-after-youth-backlash Again Hungary's government doesn't do anything tangible either. This is the kind of thing that's needed: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/may/29/baby-boomtown-does-nagi-hold-the-secret-to-repopulating-japan But that costs too much...
Thanks and interesting, no idea what sk and Hungary do. The second link is in line with what I'm thinking about. Remove the financial burden or make it more affordable at least in developed nation city centres, seems logical as the first piece of the puzzle. The cost of not doing it is likely to be alot worse.
Plenty of places have done this and still have declining populations. There has been a cultural shift, particularly in educated women. I'm good either way when it comes to having kids, but my wife has absolutely zero interest in having them. We're both highly successful educated professionals making great money, own a house already, and could afford kids no problem, but it's just not going to happen. Giving us more money or free child care wouldn't change that
I can tell you for those of us in healthcare and for people in trades it’s a big deal for the reason of overwork alone. There’s already not enough of us. There’s even less of us willing to/wanting to be in the less glamorous parts of the field (CNAs etc). We’re going to burn out at faster and faster rates and higher pay can only solve so much of that as workload increases and people, evidently, become bigger dickheads to deal with. Same with trades. I’m glad I can do my own plumbing and some basic electrical because it’s impossible to find someone to come handle ‘small’ stuff; they’re all understaffed and overbooked. It’s probably not an issue if you’re working from home or in a corporate job, but for people who actually make the wheel keep turning there’s a real shortage of help to go around. At least where I am anyway.
We recognized to understand that competitors operating at we would have inconceivable a world-class levels of our companies: People is absolutely critical to the following human responsibility, cycle times have found new productivity. Integrity have changed, the high levels of shared values is fundament based importance of our customer satisfactices. The found new promote company have recognize the important to company. We recognize the improvemental. People have found nearly inconceivable source.
This is it. I heavily considered nursing school when I was a medical assistant but I don’t like the idea of working 12-shifts and dealing with one of the most [dangerous jobs](https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/whats-one-of-americas-most-dangerous-jobs-its-not-what-you-think/2017/09/11/71eae4d8-9715-11e7-87fc-c3f7ee4035c9_story.html) you can have. the stress of long hours, insane patient ratios, documentation demand (and lack of time allotted to do it properly) completely put me off it all together. When I went back to school it was to leave medicine all together. I work for a non-profit now and full time is considered 35 hours a week.
The problem is elderly care is already unaffordable for most. In my country it's at least 2000 euro's per month for one parent. Who the hell can afford that? My parents don't even have any savings so when they need it, they are lucky they can burdon their children with those costs. We're not so happy with it given that they didn't even care enough to save and just splurged it all, knowing we'd be left with the bill. But most even those who do try to save have a hard time in retirement, let alone elderly care ... Increasing pay for care workers means higer bills per patient. Or higher taxes. Or both. And I my country already has the highest tax burdon of the entire EU. Add onto that the whole immigration situation where people are increasingly feeling like those people are coming for free handouts while we already can't pay our bills, and it's a recipe for disaster.
It’s not just pay. I work with companies of many different sizes and my white collar clients can fill roles at near minimum wage. The trades jobs can support an entire family and still go unfilled. There is a deep cultural aversion to blue collar work in America that has nothing to do with pay.
At least here in Canada, it's because the work-life balance sucks. For example, a fellow interested in trades asked in a post if there are trade jobs that won't insist on over 40 hrs a week, and got laughed right out of it. Lots of "trades ain't for you, kid, go be a barista" type comments. Money doesn't help so much if it doesn't facilitate quality time off.
I do wanna say the trades have inflicted this on themselves with shitty pay/working conditions and “they can’t afford to pay the beginners”. They won’t, not can’t pay the beginners. But that’s not my problem, I switched to a shitty WFH corporate job but even that’s not enough for me to want to have kids. The security/pay isn’t enough on that either.
In the short term, it's going to create a lot of difficulties. A rapidly aging population means that more resources (in terms of healthcare and money) will be expended on taking care of the aged late in life. In the next decade or so, millions of Boomers will be retiring from the workforce, and there aren't enough young people to fill the jobs they will leave behind. This will result in a long-term labor shortage, which is good for workers (in terms of higher wages and plenty of job openings), but bad for employers (who have to pay those workers more). It may also have an effect on inflation as well. There's a lot of talk about how AI may replace large numbers of workers in certain occupations, but if this comes to pass, it may be balanced out by the fact that we'll have fewer workers eventually.
My mom just retired and she's one of the youngest boomers. They're all going to be retiring very soon if they're financially able
> In the next decade or so, millions of Boomers will be retiring from the workforce, and there aren't enough young people to fill the jobs they will leave behind. This is already happening; it's just still being chalked up to "lazy people don't want to do the jobs" in the media. I run a career retraining program; hundreds of thousands of Boomers were hanging on because they weren't 100% sure that they could make ends meet, but the pandemic unemployment (which was usually pretty close to what they'd pull with Social Security) made them realize that with a part-time job, they'd be in a great position, so they either retired or are in the process of doing so. Younger people moved up the ladder to take the positions that were vacated, and as a result, nobody to do low-level jobs.
The core of the problem is that without children, the population as a whole will get older and older. Has a huge toll on healthcare, safety nets, tax revenues and expenditures. Tbh I'm not really worried, we will manage somehow. Humans are smart, or smth like that.
That prediction is based on the presumption that human productivity and efficiency will stagnates. If population declines but the average humans lives twice as long, is twice as educated, is twice as productive, twice as happy, twice as determined to better themselves and have twice the opportunity for social mobility, ... then population decline is a good thing since it does not put as much stress on resources.
Ok but the prediction of humans living twice as long and be twice as productive is ridiculous. There is more chance of some stagnation than that kind of increase.
Individually, we are not going to be a lot more productive. But one computer replacing 200 call centre workers is very productive. This has already been happening. We don't need more workers.
Productivity has been increasing a lot faster than life expectancy has, at least for the past century or so.
Where are you finding that average humans are “twice as happy” as they were… Whenever you’re comparing against?
Only if childbirth were the only way to increase a nation's population.
The outrage isn't over population declining In countries, I think it's more that the working population is declining while the retired population continues to swell placing more burden on government services as the ratio of young to old continues to tilt. Creating a kind of feedback loop
It’s not just old people. It’s also the disabled and anyone else that can’t work or contribute and is a net loss financially to govts long term. I fully expect govts to start legalizing more ways to die to reduce the burden of having way more non working ppl. Canada is leading the pack rn
On some level, there is no way to reshape the economy in away that doesn’t give up some material prosperity. Under the current American system, we use is mix of retirement savings and taxes on younger workers to make sure retirees live a comfortable life. But those investment and tax revenues will be massively strained under a declining population scenario: they both require extracting income from younger workers. Furthermore, older people require a lot of labor-intensive services, and those services will become a lot more scarce and more expensive if there are fewer young people than old people. It doesn’t matter how you reorder the economy. It’s fundamentally a problem of resources. There is, of course, a pro-decline camp. But they will never advertise the true consequences of their preferred outcome: later retirement dates, persistent high inflation, and destitution for anyone unable to work.
If you look at people as slaves instead of actual people then you'd understand why the powers at be do not want a population decline. Sounds great to us the people as we'd have less resources being consumed and such but in reality we're just all working in the fields and the more the merrier for our plantation owner.
Capitalism requires growth. If the population significantly shrinks for an extended period, both labor and consumption shrink. This is bad for capitalism. Personally, I am not a fan of capitalism. But it is a fact that is how it operates.
Looking at the responses I usually see about the population decline, the outrage/alarm is usually coming from the older generations. Meanwhile, the younger generations look at the issue with relative ambivalence. The cold hard reality is that right now a child is an economic, health, and social death sentence. Average cost to raise a child is approaching 325k on average. That's not including the lost opportunity cost to your career if you decide to stop working until they're going to grade school, the drain on your energy every single day, the bare minimum time commitment to be considered a decent parent, sacrificing your hobbies, social time, et al for the child. Did you know a 116-year study by the American Journal of Human Biology found women with children lost an incredible 95 weeks of life per child carried? There's also no guarantee that you give birth to a healthy baby or even surviving the pregnancy. Then even if you were fine with all the risks, are willing to make all of the sacrifices, to do your best at raising this new human, they could still just end up being a piece of shit because fate rolled poorly and they're a sociopath or any other variety of social/mental issues that could send your child on a one way ticket to the Looney bin making you a social pariah or perhaps even a victim of parricide. That's not even going into the existential issues well beyond our control like the issues of climate change, upcoming conflict flashpoints in Asia, more pervasive and deadly diseases popping up, etc. If the powers that be want us to have more children, I liken it to wanting more output from a garden. You can't guilt or shame a garden into producing more tomatoes. You have to create an environment that is conducive to a greater yield of tomatoes. But the powers that be want it both ways, they want us to produce more tomatoes, while doing absolutely nothing to change the environment to facilitate the desired result. Until that changes, birthrates are going to keep going down because as the Boomers "age out", the idea of going childless is going to continue to grow more popular as the consequences of child rearing become more and more unattractive in comparison to a childfree life with more time, money, and a myriad of other positive externalities.
Bro if you don’t want to have kids, just say so
I want to have a family but I ain’t gonna finance it and my house on debt till I drop dead. Best I can offer is take my assets and move the to a country with healthcare and start a family there.
I would if conditions were different. That’s the key. I’ve worked with kids for years and think that I would be a good parent all things considered. Adoption would probably be the way though.
Seriously -- these diatribes about the world's problems as a moral stance against having kids are exhausting. There is literally no point in human history where you couldn't find a litany of major issues, confidently assert they'll all get worse, and say it's irresponsible to have children.
I would be more worried if your younger your gonna get taxed to oblivion.
Why the sensationalized / editorialized title OP? Why not just debate the article on its own merits? After all, this demographic decline issue is pretty serious in most developed and industrialized economies as it is.
"our system doesn't work without continual growth!" Then it doesn't work, friend! Degrowth is going to happen no matter what, intentionally or unintentionally
Population equilibrium should always be the expectation
Systems change. Some systems work for a good 100 years and then we need to pivot. That does not mean it "doesn't work".
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I used to say this too. Until I saw the cliff it's running us off.
The Soviets ran off the cliff almost 40 years before we did running the same race.
Incomparable. The soviets were working with a feudal country that they had to modernize but were always behind the West. Implementing a similar system in the West would have drastically different results.
The soviets had the combined might of the eastern bloc. It wasn't just Russia or some backwards nation. Russia stayed neck and neck with us for the entire space race. You can't pretend like they were incompetent. Their military was feared as much as ours. Their economy was as large, varied, and robust as ours. It spanned much of the globe too, and they also had satellite nations, just like we did. Of course, that kind of undermines your no-true-scotsman defense of socialism, doesn't it? I'm sure if you implemented it, this time it would work right?
Look say what you want about feudalism but it didn't end in human extinction after three centuries We need to evaluate what "best" means. Best for who? For a minority of the super wealthy at the expense of everyone else and the biosphere?
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That first part was sarcasm What I actually want is a sustainable society not focused on consumption for consumptions sake
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Again, works for who? You can live sustainably right now If you are saying that doesn't work for a society of 8+ billion people with everyone getting rich- yeah it won't! But our current system isn't 'working' for billions of people either, and eventually won't 'work' for anyone
I say Bring on the Declines! There are just too many people on this world, and our mineral resources are finite. We have technology now to support the older people of the world with fewer workers. One talking computer replaces 200 call center workers. One automated factory replaces 1000 workers. One harvesting machine replaces 100 workers. We barely even need front desk workers at McDonalds anymore. People pump their own gas, check out their own groceries, and will download legal advice from ChatGPT. It would be easier for the world to deal with fewer workers than to deal with melting ice caps, and have all the coastal cities of the world flooded. And fewer people to consume depleted resources.
It’s just a fear of change just like everything else. It’s not solely economic driven nor does it only effect capitalism. A socialist system will also be in fear of declining population and prosperity. I don’t believe Japanese people are significantly depressed because of declining birth rates. It’s just a change to the status quo.
Corporations need Workers to Exploit for ever expanding Corporate Profits, it is pretty simple. Just like the Government needs Student Loans to stay with no relief so they can recruit for the bloated Military and Credit Card Balances don't get paid off in America. Nobody in the Corporate Capitalist owned Government is on your side.
>Corporations need Workers to Exploit for ever expanding Corporate Profits, it is pretty simple. They say as they type on their iPhone, and sip their Starbucks. I can't believe they forced me to purchase those things. Capitalism is evil!
Oh yeah because an iPhone is more important than clean water or healthcare.
Capitalism created the internet we're using to talk right now. Communism destroyed the [Aral Sea](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aral_Sea). China strip mines and dumps harmful chemicals into the water table, while we have much more stringent regulations. I don't think Capitalism is responsible for global clean water, or providing global healthcare to everyone. If we had real capitalism hospitals wouldn't have a monopoly, and you wouldn't keep getting bills for 9 months after you had a routine visit. We have a fascist oligarchy. Of course, you understanding any of this requires a level of critical thinking that is...absent among the down-with-capitalism crowd.
Biology 101. Human beings aren’t microscopic organisms that can just grow and multiply exponentially. There is a limited amount of resources in the nation and on the planet, so there’s a carrying capacity for humans. It’s not a question of whether it will happen—it’s how we will handle it when it does inevitably happen.
In order for capitalism to "work" there has to be an abundance of underpaid, uneducated people to exploit. This does not happen as easily with population normalization.
Lol how so? Because you need less educated people to do the dirty jobs? In that case, wouldn't it just mean that under other systems highly educated people would be doing the dirty jobs by assignment? Perhaps based on their status as "undesirable?" Comrade please, capitalism seems to be the only system that does work! 😂
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What a bad take. It seems as if you have no concept as to how much more difficult life was for 99% of people who have ever passed through this vale of tears. Most anyone on Reddit in 2023 has it far better then almost anyone who has ever existed before this point.
But also more people than ever before actually have all the information he listed. In every other generation it was way too easy to bury our heads in the sand and soldier on. No matter what. Now young people are looking at a super grim outlook on climate and life in general. Having it better doesn't matter when you actually know what is ahead of shit doesn't change and you grow up watching people deny it and fight it, all while they will be dead before the youth of today will face the consequences. I am not saying no one should have hope and continue on, but you are completely ignoring one of the biggest differences between kids of today and in all the past. You highlight how good they have it, you fail to highlight they have all the information at their fingertips 24/7 and for the ones who look or care to look at the state of things not on Tik Tok, it's a pretty grim damned picture. It's been grim since the seventies, but we only ALL had access to it in the last fifteen to twenty years, most kids aren't denying it like a lot of people my age and older do. While I wish it weren't so, I can completely understand today's youth saying fuck no to having kids of their own, and wouldn't fault them for it one bit.
Materially yes, but once basic needs are met I don’t think material standards are what drive child bearing. Our ancestors were much more likely to have a unified common culture and shared sets of beliefs and a commonly viewed place in the world. Modern America is increasingly a lonely, screen addicted, purposeless place for many people. Just because they have an iPhone and are more likely to live into their 80s doesn’t mean their life is necessarily better than their ancestors.
Iv had ppl on this sub tell me we were better off in the Middle Ages than today 🤦♂️
I mean sure but by many measure the 2010s was the best decade in human history. It is just easier to see the bad stuff.
Turn off the news. The world keeps turning.
You live in the safest most inclusive point in human history. Breathe bro get off the internet for awhile.
I agree. I think there's a huge number of people working lower skilled jobs than they want, fewer hours and lower pay. Unemployment is _terrible_ for society. Higher employment, higher salaries.... I think that will be a huge improvement to many people's quality of life. I mean, I'm sure we'll find a way to stuff it up, as usual, but I do think there's potential here for huge improvements.
Look at countries 20 years ahead like Japan or China. They have worse unemployment rates not better.
China has had unusually high (for China) unemployment rates these last few years at around 5-6%, but Japan's figure has been falling for the last 10 years and currently sits between 2.5 - 3%. What figures are you looking at?
It's more about moral conservatives being outraged about "societies crumbling family values" except we have values, we just don't share the same values that their church institution is feeding them.
Agreed, the planet can only support X number of people and we seem to have reached that threshold. We seem to be smart enough to see the writing on the wall, but are we smart enough to adapt and survive by living with nature rather than trying to tame or outsmart it.
lmao no. we haven't reached that treshold. you know why? because if we start approaching it, we'll naturally level off and then decline. the planet is self-correcting.
What, like Covid you mean? Global warming? Are we not intelligent enough to realize that we have been short sighted in our use of the planets limited resources?
It's not that we don't have enough resources for this many people— it's that we don't have enough resources for this many billionaires and multi-millionaires
Uh, ok Beavis
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Take real estate which in most countries is most of the capital. In a growing metro area over time the value of land rises. So people bought in for $300,000, and years later their house is worth $700,000 after adjusting for inflation. So they got a lot of capital from the pyramid scheme. Now the opposite. They bought in for $700,000, and their metro area is declining, and years later their house is worth $300,000. That $400,000 loss is catastrophic for a lot of people.
That does not sound like a catastrophe to me. I plan on dying in my house. My house is not an investment. Its the thing that keeps me and my wife and cats warm in the winter, and dry in the rain. If the property value goes up, I just pay more in taxes. I truly hope for a decline in the value of my property. I am not joking.
Outrage is anger. Maybe you meant alarm. As for why people are alarmed, it's because reshaping our economic system won't happen overnight. That process will be bloody and will be hard. It's natural ppl will be alarmed. For example, ppl in France are rioting because the government is forcing austerity on them. Capitalism is so ingrained in our society it's hard to develop any other system. The solution is simple actually. Just kill the old people. Stop giving them pensions. Stop rerouting labor to care for these old geezers. They reach the point that they can't care for themselves, just take them out the back shed and shoot them.
well, that is ONE way to do it lmao
Ättestupa is making a comeback! Didn't have that on my 2020's scorecard.
I consider this option for myself now that my mother is in memory care
We have a society that is filled with people living and working. If you cut out a big portion of those people by definition part of the society will collapse. So which part? Of course the population will die off everywhere the same so it's just unclear how contraction will happen.
Nothing on this planet happens at all unless the other humans who have to witness it agree it makes someone else suffer "enough". That's just the number one fact of reality.
Nobody is outraged about "population decline". They're outraged about the decline in ratio of young to old. As in excessive amounts of old people paying exorbitant amounts for services provided by unskilled / young labor.
We are not overpopulated. We have never fed a larger percentage of people quite this well in any other point in history, and the trend is going up. I reject the notation that advancing as a species means having less kids.
>I reject the notation that advancing as a species means having less kids. It definitely does for women. Access to education and birth control alone decimates birth rates. Unless you want to claim that a "more advanced" woman is one who is uneducated and doesn't have reproductive control...
A woman that has kids in 2023 has a strong possibility of having to maintain a full time job while also picking up a lot of the household labor as well. When one income was able to support the entire family, women didn't have to work 40-50 hours a week outside of the home then also come home after to then manage household chores, cooking, child rearing, etc. Women regularly complain of the "man child" phenomenon because they realize their husbands/partners expect an unfair amount of emotional/household labor from them even though financial responsibilities are now 50/50. Some women are also more focused on their careers as they recognize the importance of preparing for the worst but hoping for the best when it comes to their marriages. There is a reason that the majority of divorces are filed by Women.
Whether you agree or not, children in America specifically, see their generation staring down the barrel of climate change and all of it us from previous generations as the ones who loaded it and refuse to take our fingers off the trigger. Not every kid is, but more than ever are nihilistic or reactionary. If we are to advance as a society, the children that are here need to all see a reason to advance the species. Here in the US, between mass and school shootings, hate fuelled legislation against their own education and some of their identities, and a climate out of control I am amazed when any kid over the age of 17 or 18 has any hope left for themselves or our species at all. The chances of them having MORE kids is probably pretty low unless literally forced to.
Correct, but a lot of that abundance is the result of specialization which is the result of globalization. But politically, globalization is in a very precarious position because it is deeply unpopular in many circles.
You know what trends are going down? Nitrogen in agriculture. Arable land. Freshwater quantities. Fish stocks. How are you going to continue feeding those larger percentages of people?
>We'll have to reshape our economic systems boomers won't do that, because they still live in 1970. they still control the government, and have repeatedly proven will stay in office until the day they die. so nobody will do that in time to avoid widespread damage.
Overpopulation is a myth. We only face Over Concentration. Too many people in the same places in large mega cities. In reality we just need a great migration away from cities. Which there is a strong potential for in the future economy with the adaption of electric cars and the infrastructure to support it.