If you wanted the younger generation to continue producing workers for the capitalist machine, you should have made sure that potential parents had enough resources to actually maintain a family if they started one.
But yeah, that would have slightly reduced quarterly profits, and we can't have that kind of long-sightedness messing with the short-term returns of our shareholders.
Those countries are all below replacement level too though. This is a problem that's affecting almost every country in the world, not just the US.
In fact the US has been able to avoid the problem for a while because of immigration but even that's not able to keep the replacement level up anymore.
But there are currently, in the United States, right now, too many people. We need less people to be born so there are less people, and we need it to continue for probably 30 years.
As others have already replied to you - every developed country has the same issue. And capitalism is not the problem. It's actually never is a problem, it's usually a solution.
If only there were people in this world who would want to come to our country . Heck, we could set up a system where employers can post jobs that they have trouble filling and we could match up people outside country who can fill that need. Then, if those people turn out to be decent and moral, we can let them stay in the country permanently.
It is too bad that everyone outside of the country is a foreigner who wants to steal jobs.
Immigrants help out in the short term, but then they and their children realize the same thing that people who already live here do: that wages are too low, and that rent and cost of living is too high to support children.
Plus, corporations can use those immigrants to bust unions and keep wages down and rent prices up. Supply and demand, because we live in an oligrarchic dystopia that doesn't have enough social safety nets to make sure that new workers coming in don't sabotage the ones currently working.
I'm the children of immigrants and hang around with the children of other immigrants, and we're not having children ourselves, or ware waiting until increasingly later ages (minimum 30) because of how expensive it is to live, even without children. It only takes 1 generation to realize that new immigrants will just get stuck in the same rut that non-immigrants are already in.
Adding more people just increases the power of corporations (the real government) to treat workers as disposable objects. It's probably why corporate run governments don't try to stabilize unstable regions, but rather prefer to exploit them until there's a mass migration. More people to use for dangerous labor = more expendables that no one can afford to care about.
The very same reason NATO destroyed Libya's infrastructure including water pipelines and plunged all their inhabitants back to the dark ages back in 2011, and now NATO countries are complaining they are getting full of immigrants. Maybe if they hadn't commited war crimes there they would have stayed there. That waterway increased the country's carrying capacity and destroying it could arguably be classified as genocide.
Yeah, globalization is a bit of a trap. The short term gains are enticing but we're just pushing off the inevitable.
Plus, on a global scale, it's just people moving around. In the short term it may benefit one country or another, but it's just shuffling what we already have.
Then you're just committing them to taking low paying jobs. Don't you see what is going on? This is what happened after the black plague that ended feudalism. We need to stick to our guns and make them increase wages. Your argument to have immigration solve the baby crisis is EXACTLY what business owners want. They WANT to keep wages low with an infinite influx of people from poor countries because these immigrants won't know they are getting fucked in the ass with low pay.
Which is itself fine, until you take into account the long and ongoing history of the way that immigrants, marginalized demographics, and particularly immigrants from marginalized groups are treated by our justice system, whether or not they've actually committed a serious crime or any crime at all.
I've started rolling my eyes at "Who decides?" prompts. Whether it's judging people, interpreting laws, etc.
PEOPLE. People process your grocery purchase at checkout, and verify you found everything okay. People determine whether the charge of murder is substantially proven and justified. People evaluate a person's immigration application.
This is not a brand new science. Fallible, sure. Imperfect, sure. Useless, absolutely not.
Thank you for responding. My "who decides" comment was an unuseful shortand for what I wanted to express, which is that I don't have much trust in our institutions to carry out the will of the people.
My response to that clarification is the same as my first response. The institutions we use to represent our wills are made up of people, just like us. In the end, it comes down to distrust of other people; be it those you see as “Government people” or “Other side people”.
If your problem with a new system is that you don’t trust the decisions made by other people, I think ultimately that is the real issue - and it can either be considered an issue with your own levels of trust, or issues with people’s trustworthiness. One way or another, society will rely on systems run by itself.
Yes, the real issue is trust. Agreed. The Supreme Court is my example of mistrust. I don't believe every member is upholding their oath to do their job in the interests of the many vs. who is paying them on the side.
I hope you read this as a continuing discussion, not an argument.
18 years feels like an outdated number. I know very few people around that age who are financially secure enough to move out, often even with roommates.
Given the ability to automate production, its not really a bad thing for the population to decrease. Of course the process of decreasing and the sociatal adjustments are going to be... difficult.
The surface area of just the land alone on Earth is more than enough to house every human alive right now. Its actually more than enough to house every human that ever lived since the dawn of human history on it with room to spare according to expert calculations. The global population didnt even hit 1 billion people until like 1800. Now, if you subtract out all the currently unlivable areas because of nuclear radiation and harsh weather and such, you're still going to have enough land for every human alive right now to live comfortably.
Its just that modern humans hate the idea of living so spread out, and apparently all want to be stacked into the same 10 miles of land. Also, governments charge money for land, they're not giving that away for free.
EDIT: In case you or someone else wants to check exact math, heres the data:
Earth Land Area: 148,326,000 square km (this is actually only 30% of the Earths total surface area, the other 70% is covered by water)
Human population (total since dawn of humanity, estimated): ~110,000,000,000
Human population (current) ~8,000,000,000
My estimations put it at around 15,000 square feet per person ever born, or approximately 200,000 square feet per person alive right now.
Humans need to eat. The land needed for agriculture already covers significant percentage of the habitable land. About half based on our world in data [1]. Yes most of this is due to livestock so this can be significantly reduced but still.
Other species also need space to live. Even if you look at it in s strictly selfish fashion and disregard the right of other species to exist - we are part of the ecosystem so if it dies we die.
The land's not the problem though. Sustainable development is, and larger populations inevitably contribute to global warming, waste etc. The fact that cities only account for a small portion of land doesn't change anything. They will continue to exist and are only manageable if the population is controlled
Doesn't it take into account a lot more than just land though? Obviously the planet is huge but just because it could fit everyone doesn't mean the Earth's ecosystems would support it.
It's much - MUCH - more efficient to have most people living in a small amount of land than all spread out, American style. Look up the massive dead towns of America if you want proof. The U.S.A. is killing itself by spreading people further from civil centers in the name of short-term profits.
Maybe it would be better for americans to stop creating even more suburbia and increasing their resource consumption transporting tons of food and water away from city centers. As a bonus, vehicle dependency lowers dramatically.
The part I don't understand is why it's important to hit the "replacement level". Wouldn't it be better for the planet if there were fewer people living on it and competing for resources?
The Ponzi scheme, that is American “social security” (I mean actual social security, but all the rest of the social services too), would collapse if there arent more poor people pumping money into, than are taking out of it. Instead of doing shit like taxing the fuck out of the rich, or AI/robots.
But, yes, it would solve A LOT of the worlds problems if there were less people.
How do you figure. If the workforce becomes by and large robotic, taxing the businesses, based on that, like you would humans, would work well enough. If not, then there needs to be some concession from businesses to pay the same or more as when humans were doing the jobs.
The economy will crumble if we don't get to replacement levels at least, but it will also crumble, along with everything else if we do. Only way out of this is to change the whole model before it crumbles. But that would mean the rich need to get (willingly) less rich, so I'm not holding out hope...
Yes, but our whole economy, and maybe even society itself is built on the requirement and assumption of growth.
We steal tomorrow to pay for today.
If we stop having enough people to grow, we will collapse under the requirements of our system until a new non-growth economy/society is formed from the ashes.
I don't think it will be possible to have a smooth transition to a non-growth or low-growth society since very few people will willingly sacrifice the amenities we pay with in debt, which is paid for by predicted growth.
When that predicted growth goes negative, collectively, we will not be able to afford the things we want, and that will cause mass chaos and potentially even resource wars.
Actually, you're right, and I think that lowered populations are a good thing. World needs quality people, not just quantity. A world filled with a smaller amount of environmentally conscious and responsible people is better than a world filled with a large amount of meat eating, gas guzzler driving jackasses that spend all their time being racist, while overconsuming everything and yelling and shooting at anyone who even suggests that maybe they should cut down on consumption.
That's true but the largest impact is caused by billionaires who fly even-more-gas-guzzling private jets, hunt and/or eat endangered species, buy gold and jewelry made with blood materials from Africa and use their spending power to influence the world negatively in multiple ways for profit.
That's the funny thing to me about this. There's a direct contradiction between the needs of capitalism and the needs of the planet. Infinite growth, overpopulation, it's all grand for $$$
The economy requires growth, but the actual planet requires less people. The only sustainable countries on earth right now are places like Japan, where the economy is crumbling due to the aging population.
Really makes it clear that our artificial systems aren't in sync with our actual needs.
Replacement level shouldn't be a goal when the population increases every year. At the very least house prices should be neutral or decreasing relative to wages, if you want more people than you're already getting.
It's like a bully kicking and beating you blue then complaining you won't just tell the teacher you're fine.
Like no shit. Multiple "once in a generation" recessions, rent pricing people out of places to live, inflation out the ass on basically everything, all the while wages stay stagnant as fuck. That's not even accounting for the absolute climate disaster we're inheriting.
Of course people are both less able to have kids and less inclined to have kids to put through the grinder of life. The very people complaining about this are the ones who helped create and continue on this scenario!
Rochester NY has been building tons of "luxury" apartments which are just giant buildings made cheaply to fit as many people in them and rent is like 1,800-2,200. Or you can rent an old chopped up into units city home from a slum lord and it's actually old and dirty for like 900.
Me and my gf make ends meet ( sometimes not) just by being alive and eat, we go super rarely out and didn't had vacation the last 10 years.
Doesn't help that I got I'll and need to hold now a special food diet till I die which makes mostly everything I can eat like 2x as expensive and it was rough for us before my illness.
What's your diet about, Celiac? I have Celiac and so have to eat strictly gluten free, of course. This means bread, pasta, crackers, baking flour, frozen pizza etc all cost twice as much, like you're saying. It's mainly smaller brands and priced like specialty/organic foods. I tend to eat mainly things that are gluten free by default and aren't special versions like potatoes, chicken, tofu, fresh green beans, tomatoes, sour cream and so on. I also have a tree nut allergy, so even some specialty resaurants are difficult. Not being able to eat at almost every restaurant is lame, but one bright side, it must save me a lot of money!
It's a complex subject that deserves legitimate scientific study. There are known detrimental effects of low fertility rates in a country, but they often take a long time to manifest. However, there are also many examples of horrific consequences of governments trying to affect fertility rate.
For sure. Somehow Nestle still pisses me off more though. Corporations that get too powerful are the real danger to us today in my opinion. But they draw a lot of parallels with the old corrupt communist regimes.
..It's a really super basic entry level concept in understanding demographics and populations, plus economics, human geography, migration trends, society in general, etc. There's nothing dystopian about it. (Arguably, the fact that people instantly think such studies are dystopic is itself dystopic.)
Millennials and Gen-Z are truly the lost generation.
Imagine still living with parents in your late twenties or even early thirties because you simply cannot afford to even rent your own place. Now imagine that work pays like shit and you are busting your ass working long hours to chase an eternal pipe dream of economic prosperity. You can't even seek psychiatric help for your ailing mental health because it's expensive, inaccessible and oversubscribed.
For a man, being in that situation makes you downright undateable so it's not like you can rely on the joint incomes that couples do either.
And we wonder why toxic masculinity is on the rise...
The rich have done a smash & grab on the economy and made everybody poorer as a result of their own greed. It's a dangerous game.
Looking at the way things have been going for years (decades) now, giving someone a birth would be a huge disservice - they'll inherit a simultaneously more globalized and divided world, a world with technology that has the potential to trivialize sharing knowledge and experience, which is instead use to drive up engagement for the sake of profits, effectively breeding hate groups and echo chambers, a world with economy consisting of bubbles and not-so-careful manipulations, leaving our offspring in a position few would probably envy. Oh, and there's rapid climate change that is being ignored and actively accelerated by the people and other entities that are capable of doing anything about it.
I know more than a few people who have never considered any of the above, and I'm sure many people here know such people as well, so it's more than safe to say that whatever the humanity is facing in the near future, it's nothing similar to extinction through lack of birth.
The future seems really good for certain groups of people, but I doubt my kids could be a part of these groups, or even want to a part of these groups. Not that I would actively indoctrinate them, but I'd imagine that living with me through the years when they're developing and shaping themselves is going to leave its mark regardless.
Maybe I'll regret that decision when it's already too late, of course, but then again, this is not going to be a world-ending decision by no merit.
It's not just millennials. I was born 5 years after the end of the Baby Boomers and by the time I was 20 everything was becoming out of reach. Add a energy crisis or two, 40 years of Republican austerity for anyone but themselves, and a few financial crashes We the People ended-up bailing out, and I never got anywhere enough traction to do more than just get by without a mountain of debt. We never outran the entitlement of the Boomer generation.
Good luck Millennials - and I mean it - but the only way out is to get out of the US while you can.
Hasn't the fertility rate in the US been going down from the 1960s? With immigrations covering the shortfall?
Actually looking at the data. It went down significantly in the 60 and 70s. Then picked up in the 80s, 90s and early 2000. Then started dropping again from 2010.
But one thing to note to seem to be that it never went past replacement rate after 1972. 2.1 is considered to the global number for replacement. So for the last 60 years or so immigration has kept the population growing in absolute terms.
Not making a political statement, I find it weird when people club a huge group of people into one bucket and brand them.
I do not like the terms but sticking to the terms here. It looks like the young boomers had a similar number of children to today and the older boomers were already dropping the number of children they were having.
I'm 33 and me and my so are not having children. Cope you capitalist pigs. I'm living my one life the way I want and you can fk off with your credit cards and apple pies.
I know xers that kids but, at least from the ones I know, im pretty sure its not replacement level. Many have zero, some have1, and 2+ ones are crazy or first generation in the country.
My family basically adopted a kid that was in need. We aren’t having our own kids. It’s too expensive and we both don’t want to pass on our own mental health traits.
I absolutely hate the inter-generational blame game. Probably because I don't even feel like I belong to any generation as I was born right at the end of 1980, so I'd be a young genXer or something. I don't even know how these generations are decided upon, but in particular I'm sick of hearing everything getting blamed on Millennials all the time, since it really feels like it's mostly a bunch of old rich conservatives doing all the moaning, and is largely the same kind of people as those moaning about bicycle lanes and wind turbines.
I just did a quick search to find a random list of 40 things Millennials are frequently blamed for. Some of the things in the list are absolutely stupid as fuck, but I'm sure we've all seen such articles. I guess it's easier to generate clicks with headlines blaming Millennials for the downfall of Western civilisation instead of maybe writing a thoughtful article on why there are fewer people having kids, that perhaps investigates issues the commenter mentions.
Dumping shit on any group of ppl is so the in group can have someone to blame and hate. The illegals took-er-jerbs! You don't have to have a plan, meaningful conversation or acknowledge the cause of the problem if you give the in group a blow-off valve for the reason their lives are shit.
Also blaming the younger generation for being lazy, stupid, wrong is a tale as old as time. There's Greek writings of some one talking shit about young ppl.
If you wanted the younger generation to continue producing workers for the capitalist machine, you should have made sure that potential parents had enough resources to actually maintain a family if they started one.
But yeah, that would have slightly reduced quarterly profits, and we can't have that kind of long-sightedness messing with the short-term returns of our shareholders.
I've been told it's going to trickle down any moment now...
Population growth is a pyramid scheme.
Capitalism is a pyramid scheme.
FTFY
You can always move to North Korea if you don't like capitalism that much.
This is like if a guy starving in the desert complained he wants water and you offered to toss him into the middle of the ocean.
Why do we have to go to the extreme. The scandanavian countries are socialist/capitalist countries and they have one of the best living conditions.
Those countries are all below replacement level too though. This is a problem that's affecting almost every country in the world, not just the US. In fact the US has been able to avoid the problem for a while because of immigration but even that's not able to keep the replacement level up anymore.
But there are currently, in the United States, right now, too many people. We need less people to be born so there are less people, and we need it to continue for probably 30 years.
There are too many people in the cities and towns but there are many ghost towns and villages where it is unviable to live because at low population.
As others have already replied to you - every developed country has the same issue. And capitalism is not the problem. It's actually never is a problem, it's usually a solution.
lmao, stay mad nerd
I'd never actually thought of it that way but, holy shit, that's pretty damned close!
If only there were people in this world who would want to come to our country . Heck, we could set up a system where employers can post jobs that they have trouble filling and we could match up people outside country who can fill that need. Then, if those people turn out to be decent and moral, we can let them stay in the country permanently.
It is too bad that everyone outside of the country is a foreigner who wants to steal jobs.
Immigrants help out in the short term, but then they and their children realize the same thing that people who already live here do: that wages are too low, and that rent and cost of living is too high to support children.
Plus, corporations can use those immigrants to bust unions and keep wages down and rent prices up. Supply and demand, because we live in an oligrarchic dystopia that doesn't have enough social safety nets to make sure that new workers coming in don't sabotage the ones currently working.
I'm the children of immigrants and hang around with the children of other immigrants, and we're not having children ourselves, or ware waiting until increasingly later ages (minimum 30) because of how expensive it is to live, even without children. It only takes 1 generation to realize that new immigrants will just get stuck in the same rut that non-immigrants are already in.
Adding more people just increases the power of corporations (the real government) to treat workers as disposable objects. It's probably why corporate run governments don't try to stabilize unstable regions, but rather prefer to exploit them until there's a mass migration. More people to use for dangerous labor = more expendables that no one can afford to care about.
The very same reason NATO destroyed Libya's infrastructure including water pipelines and plunged all their inhabitants back to the dark ages back in 2011, and now NATO countries are complaining they are getting full of immigrants. Maybe if they hadn't commited war crimes there they would have stayed there. That waterway increased the country's carrying capacity and destroying it could arguably be classified as genocide.
Yeah, globalization is a bit of a trap. The short term gains are enticing but we're just pushing off the inevitable.
Plus, on a global scale, it's just people moving around. In the short term it may benefit one country or another, but it's just shuffling what we already have.
Then you're just committing them to taking low paying jobs. Don't you see what is going on? This is what happened after the black plague that ended feudalism. We need to stick to our guns and make them increase wages. Your argument to have immigration solve the baby crisis is EXACTLY what business owners want. They WANT to keep wages low with an infinite influx of people from poor countries because these immigrants won't know they are getting fucked in the ass with low pay.
Immigrants deserve a living wage too.
"if those people turn out to be decent and moral"
Who decides? Yikes.
‘Not a rapist, tax cheat, or murderer’ seems like a pretty low bar that most could manage to get over.
Which is itself fine, until you take into account the long and ongoing history of the way that immigrants, marginalized demographics, and particularly immigrants from marginalized groups are treated by our justice system, whether or not they've actually committed a serious crime or any crime at all.
I dunno, if they can be elected president, maybe many people in the US would be OK with it. /s
Rephrase it to: fit for our justice system
I've started rolling my eyes at "Who decides?" prompts. Whether it's judging people, interpreting laws, etc.
PEOPLE. People process your grocery purchase at checkout, and verify you found everything okay. People determine whether the charge of murder is substantially proven and justified. People evaluate a person's immigration application.
This is not a brand new science. Fallible, sure. Imperfect, sure. Useless, absolutely not.
Thank you for responding. My "who decides" comment was an unuseful shortand for what I wanted to express, which is that I don't have much trust in our institutions to carry out the will of the people.
My response to that clarification is the same as my first response. The institutions we use to represent our wills are made up of people, just like us. In the end, it comes down to distrust of other people; be it those you see as “Government people” or “Other side people”.
If your problem with a new system is that you don’t trust the decisions made by other people, I think ultimately that is the real issue - and it can either be considered an issue with your own levels of trust, or issues with people’s trustworthiness. One way or another, society will rely on systems run by itself.
Yes, the real issue is trust. Agreed. The Supreme Court is my example of mistrust. I don't believe every member is upholding their oath to do their job in the interests of the many vs. who is paying them on the side.
I hope you read this as a continuing discussion, not an argument.
Satire? I can't tell.
I would have suggested eating babies , but it would be counterproductive.
Pretty sure, but you never can tell anymore.
I mean immigration exists in every western country, I dunno what you’re complaining about.
You have a way with words my occasional butt cowboy.
Occasional Butt Cowboy
You should post this to [email protected]
haha, go ahead, I didn't even think about how funny that is out of context.
Aaaaaand subbed.
18 years if you're lucky.
18 years feels like an outdated number. I know very few people around that age who are financially secure enough to move out, often even with roommates.
Exactly.
Show us where there are conditions that would encourage people to start a family.
Hoooooo boyyyy, just wait until the next few generations are up to bat for breeding more worker bees. Population's gonna plummet :)
Given the ability to automate production, its not really a bad thing for the population to decrease. Of course the process of decreasing and the sociatal adjustments are going to be... difficult.
They'll kick you and they'll beat you and they'll tell you it's fair…
Nah, they'll tell you it's either your own or the migrants fault.
Can't think of any particular reason we need to replace the US population. It seems like we've done enough.
EXACTLY. The entire fucking world is overpopulated. This is like one of the only good things going on right now on a large scale.
This isnt actually true.
The surface area of just the land alone on Earth is more than enough to house every human alive right now. Its actually more than enough to house every human that ever lived since the dawn of human history on it with room to spare according to expert calculations. The global population didnt even hit 1 billion people until like 1800. Now, if you subtract out all the currently unlivable areas because of nuclear radiation and harsh weather and such, you're still going to have enough land for every human alive right now to live comfortably.
Its just that modern humans hate the idea of living so spread out, and apparently all want to be stacked into the same 10 miles of land. Also, governments charge money for land, they're not giving that away for free.
EDIT: In case you or someone else wants to check exact math, heres the data:
Earth Land Area: 148,326,000 square km (this is actually only 30% of the Earths total surface area, the other 70% is covered by water)
Human population (total since dawn of humanity, estimated): ~110,000,000,000
Human population (current) ~8,000,000,000
My estimations put it at around 15,000 square feet per person ever born, or approximately 200,000 square feet per person alive right now.
Two things to consider:
Humans need to eat. The land needed for agriculture already covers significant percentage of the habitable land. About half based on our world in data [1]. Yes most of this is due to livestock so this can be significantly reduced but still.
Other species also need space to live. Even if you look at it in s strictly selfish fashion and disregard the right of other species to exist - we are part of the ecosystem so if it dies we die.
[1] https://ourworldindata.org/land-use
The land's not the problem though. Sustainable development is, and larger populations inevitably contribute to global warming, waste etc. The fact that cities only account for a small portion of land doesn't change anything. They will continue to exist and are only manageable if the population is controlled
Doesn't it take into account a lot more than just land though? Obviously the planet is huge but just because it could fit everyone doesn't mean the Earth's ecosystems would support it.
It's much - MUCH - more efficient to have most people living in a small amount of land than all spread out, American style. Look up the massive dead towns of America if you want proof. The U.S.A. is killing itself by spreading people further from civil centers in the name of short-term profits.
Maybe it would be better to replace it with Europeans?
Oh wait, already tried that...
Maybe it would be better for americans to stop creating even more suburbia and increasing their resource consumption transporting tons of food and water away from city centers. As a bonus, vehicle dependency lowers dramatically.
The part I don't understand is why it's important to hit the "replacement level". Wouldn't it be better for the planet if there were fewer people living on it and competing for resources?
but then the megacorporations can't hit their iNfInItE gRoWtH and we can't keep making the billionaires richer.
@AnnaPlusPlus
Consider the number of financial instruments that are essentially pyramid schemes built on the assumption of perpetual growth.
Its all of them
The Ponzi scheme, that is American “social security” (I mean actual social security, but all the rest of the social services too), would collapse if there arent more poor people pumping money into, than are taking out of it. Instead of doing shit like taxing the fuck out of the rich, or AI/robots.
But, yes, it would solve A LOT of the worlds problems if there were less people.
To be fair, I don't think taxing robots will get you far...
How do you figure. If the workforce becomes by and large robotic, taxing the businesses, based on that, like you would humans, would work well enough. If not, then there needs to be some concession from businesses to pay the same or more as when humans were doing the jobs.
I'm moreso being cheeky about your wording - robots don't own cash, thus can't pay taxes. You must tax businesses.
Fair enough. Lol. I meant the business that own the robots.
If there's less people than jobs it's easier to ask for better wages.
It would be, but the economy was built on perpetual growth schemes.
Don't forget, the economy is here to be served by us, not the other way around!
The economy will crumble if we don't get to replacement levels at least, but it will also crumble, along with everything else if we do. Only way out of this is to change the whole model before it crumbles. But that would mean the rich need to get (willingly) less rich, so I'm not holding out hope...
There's plenty of poor people who've bought into the propaganda and refuse to sign on even if it'd help them.
Yes, but our whole economy, and maybe even society itself is built on the requirement and assumption of growth.
We steal tomorrow to pay for today.
If we stop having enough people to grow, we will collapse under the requirements of our system until a new non-growth economy/society is formed from the ashes.
I don't think it will be possible to have a smooth transition to a non-growth or low-growth society since very few people will willingly sacrifice the amenities we pay with in debt, which is paid for by predicted growth.
When that predicted growth goes negative, collectively, we will not be able to afford the things we want, and that will cause mass chaos and potentially even resource wars.
Actually, you're right, and I think that lowered populations are a good thing. World needs quality people, not just quantity. A world filled with a smaller amount of environmentally conscious and responsible people is better than a world filled with a large amount of meat eating, gas guzzler driving jackasses that spend all their time being racist, while overconsuming everything and yelling and shooting at anyone who even suggests that maybe they should cut down on consumption.
That's true but the largest impact is caused by billionaires who fly even-more-gas-guzzling private jets, hunt and/or eat endangered species, buy gold and jewelry made with blood materials from Africa and use their spending power to influence the world negatively in multiple ways for profit.
Unfortunately, it's the latter who tend to breed like rabbits.
Not for capitalism. A lot of our systems were built on the concept of infinite growth.
That, and the planet cannot sustain our population with our current systems. Why have a kid when you know their future is doomed?
I forget where I heard this stat, but the Earth could support 12 billion people if resources were distributed equitably. But, alas, :gestures broadly:
That's the funny thing to me about this. There's a direct contradiction between the needs of capitalism and the needs of the planet. Infinite growth, overpopulation, it's all grand for $$$
The economy requires growth, but the actual planet requires less people. The only sustainable countries on earth right now are places like Japan, where the economy is crumbling due to the aging population.
Really makes it clear that our artificial systems aren't in sync with our actual needs.
Are baby boomers accusing millennials? Who the fuck is accusing ? I need to know
@ypulse apparently
Wait until the "Let It Rot" movement takes hold worldwide.
Replacement level shouldn't be a goal when the population increases every year. At the very least house prices should be neutral or decreasing relative to wages, if you want more people than you're already getting.
It's like a bully kicking and beating you blue then complaining you won't just tell the teacher you're fine.
Like no shit. Multiple "once in a generation" recessions, rent pricing people out of places to live, inflation out the ass on basically everything, all the while wages stay stagnant as fuck. That's not even accounting for the absolute climate disaster we're inheriting.
Of course people are both less able to have kids and less inclined to have kids to put through the grinder of life. The very people complaining about this are the ones who helped create and continue on this scenario!
I am a member of Gen X and I think Millenials are doing the best they can with the shitshow they inherited. Earth needs fewer humans, not more.
where is $1500 rent?
Med rent for Chicago area is $1800.
Omg that's crazy. How does anyone afford to live there?
Rochester NY has been building tons of "luxury" apartments which are just giant buildings made cheaply to fit as many people in them and rent is like 1,800-2,200. Or you can rent an old chopped up into units city home from a slum lord and it's actually old and dirty for like 900.
Right?
Me and my gf make ends meet ( sometimes not) just by being alive and eat, we go super rarely out and didn't had vacation the last 10 years.
Doesn't help that I got I'll and need to hold now a special food diet till I die which makes mostly everything I can eat like 2x as expensive and it was rough for us before my illness.
Easy solution: just don't be born in the first place.
What's your diet about, Celiac? I have Celiac and so have to eat strictly gluten free, of course. This means bread, pasta, crackers, baking flour, frozen pizza etc all cost twice as much, like you're saying. It's mainly smaller brands and priced like specialty/organic foods. I tend to eat mainly things that are gluten free by default and aren't special versions like potatoes, chicken, tofu, fresh green beans, tomatoes, sour cream and so on. I also have a tree nut allergy, so even some specialty resaurants are difficult. Not being able to eat at almost every restaurant is lame, but one bright side, it must save me a lot of money!
"Accused", by who, YPulse? Why the fuck would I care about some shitpost article from a dumpster site?
It's fucked that there's even a "replacement level" in the first place
That's so fucking dystopian
Edit: typo
It's a complex subject that deserves legitimate scientific study. There are known detrimental effects of low fertility rates in a country, but they often take a long time to manifest. However, there are also many examples of horrific consequences of governments trying to affect fertility rate.
if you can have a baby by buying bottom shelve food products for the last week of a month, what happens if you get twins
I have A Modest Proposal which may help with both problems at once.
Fucking well played.
I'm trying to think of a real world example of government breeding growth that's gone wrong, but I can't think of any.
There's plenty of examples of breeding control that have gone horrific of course. I just can't think of the opposite example.
Take a look at the Wikipedia header on National efforts to increase or decrease fertility.
That Wikipedia article link reminds me of the fucked up thing nestle did with baby formula
For sure. Somehow Nestle still pisses me off more though. Corporations that get too powerful are the real danger to us today in my opinion. But they draw a lot of parallels with the old corrupt communist regimes.
The phrase "breeding control" makes me so fucking uncomfortable
The US seems to be trying a bad option. Rather than offer actual support, they are trying to force it through the guise of morality
..It's a really super basic entry level concept in understanding demographics and populations, plus economics, human geography, migration trends, society in general, etc. There's nothing dystopian about it. (Arguably, the fact that people instantly think such studies are dystopic is itself dystopic.)
it's pretty simple actually, 2.1, a pair to make baby + 0.1 for unforeseen circumstance
Royal families have a similar system, though for different motives. it's called "An heir and a spare".
Millennials and Gen-Z are truly the lost generation.
Imagine still living with parents in your late twenties or even early thirties because you simply cannot afford to even rent your own place. Now imagine that work pays like shit and you are busting your ass working long hours to chase an eternal pipe dream of economic prosperity. You can't even seek psychiatric help for your ailing mental health because it's expensive, inaccessible and oversubscribed.
For a man, being in that situation makes you downright undateable so it's not like you can rely on the joint incomes that couples do either.
And we wonder why toxic masculinity is on the rise...
The rich have done a smash & grab on the economy and made everybody poorer as a result of their own greed. It's a dangerous game.
Looking at the way things have been going for years (decades) now, giving someone a birth would be a huge disservice - they'll inherit a simultaneously more globalized and divided world, a world with technology that has the potential to trivialize sharing knowledge and experience, which is instead use to drive up engagement for the sake of profits, effectively breeding hate groups and echo chambers, a world with economy consisting of bubbles and not-so-careful manipulations, leaving our offspring in a position few would probably envy. Oh, and there's rapid climate change that is being ignored and actively accelerated by the people and other entities that are capable of doing anything about it.
I know more than a few people who have never considered any of the above, and I'm sure many people here know such people as well, so it's more than safe to say that whatever the humanity is facing in the near future, it's nothing similar to extinction through lack of birth.
The future seems really good for certain groups of people, but I doubt my kids could be a part of these groups, or even want to a part of these groups. Not that I would actively indoctrinate them, but I'd imagine that living with me through the years when they're developing and shaping themselves is going to leave its mark regardless.
Maybe I'll regret that decision when it's already too late, of course, but then again, this is not going to be a world-ending decision by no merit.
the vast majority of people who decide to be child-free don't regret the choice later in life. https://msutoday.msu.edu/news/2023/childfree-study-confirmed-April2023
It's not just millennials. I was born 5 years after the end of the Baby Boomers and by the time I was 20 everything was becoming out of reach. Add a energy crisis or two, 40 years of Republican austerity for anyone but themselves, and a few financial crashes We the People ended-up bailing out, and I never got anywhere enough traction to do more than just get by without a mountain of debt. We never outran the entitlement of the Boomer generation.
Good luck Millennials - and I mean it - but the only way out is to get out of the US while you can.
Hasn't the fertility rate in the US been going down from the 1960s? With immigrations covering the shortfall?
Actually looking at the data. It went down significantly in the 60 and 70s. Then picked up in the 80s, 90s and early 2000. Then started dropping again from 2010.
But one thing to note to seem to be that it never went past replacement rate after 1972. 2.1 is considered to the global number for replacement. So for the last 60 years or so immigration has kept the population growing in absolute terms.
Not making a political statement, I find it weird when people club a huge group of people into one bucket and brand them.
I do not like the terms but sticking to the terms here. It looks like the young boomers had a similar number of children to today and the older boomers were already dropping the number of children they were having.
But Gen-X had a higher rate for some reason.
getting a vasectomy was one of the best things I ever did for myself.
My wife and I are older millenials ('85 and '86). I got my vasectomy 2 years ago and I'm glad I did given that Roe v Wade isn't a thing anymore.
It's no wonder our government doesn't want easy access to contraceptives or abortion. They need more fresh meat for the grinder!
You don't need a vasectomy with a face like mine.
Give me economical pro's and I'll consider it
I'm 33 and me and my so are not having children. Cope you capitalist pigs. I'm living my one life the way I want and you can fk off with your credit cards and apple pies.
Capitalist pigs: "So Roe is gone, next maybe birth control?"
Get a vasectomy while it's still legal! I got one about 2 years ago.
Keep pumping out those slaves in the name of "god", born into and of suffering, sacrifices to the almighty power.
$ Praise be! $
(What a sham)
I know xers that kids but, at least from the ones I know, im pretty sure its not replacement level. Many have zero, some have1, and 2+ ones are crazy or first generation in the country.
Bwahahaha. There are already a billion people in my country. I don't need to make more.
My family basically adopted a kid that was in need. We aren’t having our own kids. It’s too expensive and we both don’t want to pass on our own mental health traits.
Get a cat.
I agree with you. We actually have two big dogs that are spoiled.
The story of our generation.
It is utterly moronic. They want people to hate immigrants more.
I absolutely hate the inter-generational blame game. Probably because I don't even feel like I belong to any generation as I was born right at the end of 1980, so I'd be a young genXer or something. I don't even know how these generations are decided upon, but in particular I'm sick of hearing everything getting blamed on Millennials all the time, since it really feels like it's mostly a bunch of old rich conservatives doing all the moaning, and is largely the same kind of people as those moaning about bicycle lanes and wind turbines.
I just did a quick search to find a random list of 40 things Millennials are frequently blamed for. Some of the things in the list are absolutely stupid as fuck, but I'm sure we've all seen such articles. I guess it's easier to generate clicks with headlines blaming Millennials for the downfall of Western civilisation instead of maybe writing a thoughtful article on why there are fewer people having kids, that perhaps investigates issues the commenter mentions.
Dumping shit on any group of ppl is so the in group can have someone to blame and hate. The illegals took-er-jerbs! You don't have to have a plan, meaningful conversation or acknowledge the cause of the problem if you give the in group a blow-off valve for the reason their lives are shit.
Also blaming the younger generation for being lazy, stupid, wrong is a tale as old as time. There's Greek writings of some one talking shit about young ppl.
https://historyhustle.com/2500-years-of-people-complaining-about-the-younger-generation/
The people linking kids to capitalism im dead bruh 💀
That's why you get a better job