So what’s your alternative? Infinite growth?
Term limits on life.
Limits on wealth.
We already have that.
Elderly population falls off quickly after age 80
Not fast enough
you want to kill them ‘slowly and peacefully’, barbarian? Get help lol.
Even in ideal conditions most humans will be dying quickly after they hit 80+ , ESPECIALLY men , even with ideal nutriation and exercise . The human body’s telomeres were not constructed to support a person who wants to live past 100 thats why so many people who are 100+ are shockingly slow and weak compared to their primes from 20s-early 40s. Even if theybwere athletes lol
You can fight and try all you want to resist death once you hit the big 100. And yea some of your efforts will work for a while Good nutrition will make it so that you have the things inside you that you need to functiom. Caretakers will ensure that you are able to reach what you cannot reach any more. Exercise , especially resistance exercise , will help you to stay mobile and stong enough to lift yourself after youve fallen… But these efforts are NOTHING in comparison to what your shortened telomeres will wreak on your body once youve hit an old enough age.
It should be noted we have no documented evidence of a person living past 117.
There’s a reason for this…
How to say you don’t understand sustainability without saying you don’t understand it. :-)
ok let’s revolt before it’s too late for the planet then?
Robots will take care of us. Meanwhile we’ll be begging for death and they will keep us alive -_-
Low birth rates are a crisis for capitalism, not humanity. And if you count brown countries, it’s not even happening.
Pension schemes are not a biological imperative.
Just for clarification, if we’re talking about sub replacement fertility rates then it would be “brown countries” except for India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Iran, Lebanon, UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, Brazil, Mexico, Chile, Argentina, Costa Rica and Cuba and more. Might be an invalid generalization now.
I think India is at threshold now.
Not really anything to do with capitalism. If the ratio of workers to non-workers decreases without a proportionate increase in productivity, a higher proportion of workers’ time has to be spent catering to the needs of non-workers. That means less time spent not working and/or less time spent producing unnecessary stuff that improves our lives like chocolate or TV shows.
Not really anything to do with capitalism. If
You think for-profit healthcare, including elder care, pharma care, and long-term care, aren’t a huge problem with capitalism written all over it, with every layer maximizing profits and minimizing services, then I I urge you to re-assess it.
I can’t really connect this comment with what you originally said. Maybe this will help clarify my position: I think countries with public health and social care, just like countries with mainly private health and social care, will have severe problems if they can’t arrest the rate at which their populations are ageing. My comment explains in very general terms why I think that is the case.
Except for population to grow it requires children which also don’t work, require more resources than elderly, and at the end of 20 years instead of freeing up resources (by dying like the elderly), continue to consume resources.
At the end of 20 years a child becomes an adult, who will (on average) be a net producer. It’s true that children cost more in work put into raising them than older adults take in work to look after them, yet it is a fact of life that one working human is capable of producing more stuff than just that which they themselves needs or makes use of - otherwise it would be impossible to raise children. This should be obvious, and means that the problem of an increasing birth rate, from this perspective, is at most temporary.
But I didn’t say we should have high birth rates, I said that the problems of low birth rates are not due to capitalism.
Land isn’t unlimited. Physical resources aren’t unlimited. For example while a person can manufacture more batteries, with more people on the planet each battery will be more expensive for everyone because each is vying for the same limited resources that are used to make a battery.
I also wouldn’t say that low birthrate is caused by capitalism but by over population. No economic system can sustain unlimited growth. When too many are competing for too few resources, there is no time for families.
You are not talking about what I was talking about, my friend.
The problem you describe as “temporary” implies that once your children are grown, they don’t have further children that will use more resources.
A worker in a growing population can somehow support 4 children and 2 parents (6 dependents) yet supporting only 2 parents and no children (2 dependents) is a problem?
So no, it’s not “temporary”. It’s a pyramid that eventually grows such that the foundation must crumble from the weight of everyone above.
You are still talking about growth. I am comparing two scenarios: one where the population shrinks (and therefore gets older on average) and one where our doesn’t, and remains the same average age. I am not saying we need to grow the population forever, and never have.
I suggest you reread my comments to see where you’ve misunderstood, but it’s up to you.
Who gives a shit. I’ll be dead.
The tricky part of being in society is that we want systems that work for more than just ourselves: It’s not a purely transactional relationship.
Great news! It doesn’t affect you either way, so we know your opinion on the matter is completely unbiased. That’s excellent.
We grow several times more food than humanity can possibly eat. We don’t have a productivity or resource shortage. We have an allocation error.
I don’t think this is true. I checked the stats for caloric supply and the highest value worldwide is (unsurprisingly) in North America where about 3,500 calories of food are produced per day. That is less than double what a person needs per day, so “several times” seems unlikely.
But I don’t dispute the idea that we produce enough food to feed the world. But I also didn’t say we didn’t.
Could you comment on what I actually said, which is that an ageing population (or any situation in which there are more non-workers per worker) will result in less production being available for people on average?
This is not just about food; it is also about other necessities (such as healthcare) but also non-essentials like entertainment. The problem of an ageing population is not that we’ll starve to death; it’s that our quality of life will decrease.
That’s not what I said. That site measures the output of the chain. I said we grow more food (ie plants) than humanity can eat. We feed the majority of that food to the livestock we keep that absolutely dwarfs the biomass of all wild animals. That introduces a 90%+ caloric inefficiency. If we just ate the plants, we would have to stop growing so much food, even all our industrial processes don’t demand that much. But capitalism demands instead that we keep growing more food than the year before, and so it demands inefficiencies like animal ag. Any scarcity is entirely engineered. It’s not an accident, it’s by design. It is necessary to maximize investor return.
No, it’s because people like eating meat. You may have noticed that people ate meat centuries ago before capitalism existed, and favoured it over other foods when it was available.
But I understand what you meant about growing multiples of food, now, so that’s good.
This isn’t just about food, but look at the number of people one farmer could feed 200 years ago (6 or so) vs today (150 or so). We spend a lot of our productive time today doing stuff we didn’t have time for just a couple hundred years ago. We’ve got a long way to fall before we are unable as a species to meet our needs. Proponents of tech advances expect our productivity to increase even if the workforce shrinks. If our standard of living delines on average, either these prognosticators are incorrect or we have a huge allocation issue.
I think it is a problem if we need to have less free time, or work more for the same things that we do in our free time, because a higher proportion of worker time needs to be spent supporting people who are not working. You don’t want to go back 200 years even if humanity could survive in such conditions. (And the present population probably could not survive)
congrats, you’ve described capitalism
if we didn’t need to make corporate profits, communities could look after each other
You do know that corporate profits are literally where old people get their money, right?
Take the posterchild of capitalism as an example, the US. People over 55 own 52% of all assets, from money to homes to companies. As a group they outweigh the billionaire class about 8 to 1 by wealth (and of course most billionaires are themselves also old). That’s how retirement investments work, you live off the backs of young people who work.
Get rid of capitalism, you just get a different way to route young people’s productivity to old people. Hell, get rid of currency and it doesn’t change. Everyone’s producing food and goods, but a large share of it goes to people who are old and no longer work. The larger the share of people not working, the larger the burden on the people not working.
Unless the population is constantly growing, retirement is a burden on young people regardless of economic system.
Nothing I said related to capitalism at all as far as I can see, so you’re going to have to connect the dots for me if you want me to understand, sorry.
we already have enough productivity
why do you think we need more?
I think if we decrease productivity, it will cause problems.
but it’s not going to decrease. it’s just not going to be spent on unnecessary stuff like toiling for corporate profits
Right now, a crisis for capitalism is a crisis for all of us, because that’s where we live.
Maybe addressing the source of the problem is a better strategy than trying to blame the symptoms?
Sure, and maybe it’s part of what pushes us to something better, but to act like it won’t have effects is not helpful.
Oh no, who did this? (sarcasm. a few people have gone out of their way to ensure everyone else’s suffering)
I don’t owe the future anything.
I don’t give a fuck if our species survives. Why should I?
Everything ends someday.
The issue is we don’t just go straight from point A to B, rather there’s a long period of suffering.
Well for one, I hope you don’t plan to take out any form of retirement or invest in the stock market, including via index funds, because that’s leeching off the productivity of young people in the future.
It’s immoral to leech off other people’s children tax money, sure.
But also no one wants to be a sucker doing 20+ years of unpaid labor raising kids, so someone else 's S&P 500 keeps growing and sustains a very comfortable retirement plan, and no one will even help you with raising kids anymore.
It’s really the system’s fault, not individuals. It makes it lucrative for every individual human to give as little back, and take as much from everyone else.
Not just fine, good.
Yes, this IS fine. There’s too many people on this fucking planet. The only reason this is considered a problem is because capitalism and the Bible says so.
No other reason. Period.
While I half agree with you, that’s definitely not the only issue.
Senior citizens become people to take care of, that won’t/can’t work and I don’t mean that in a “dear God consider the GDP” way, but literally just people who will not be contributing but still require services, in fact likely a lot more than normal.
It ends up being a lot of neglected senior citizens dying in horrible ways.
Senior citizens become people to take care of,
Children need more resources to raise than seniors take.
Not with modern lifespans, 75-95 take a ton of care and are unable to contribute
Average 64-75 have $200k savings and spend $155k for last 3 years.
A child takes $600k. ($300k from parents. $100k college. $200k paid by state to cover the free k-12.)
I suppose if you are just thinking about things like cost of formula, diapers, clothes, education. In terms of time spent, children take less and less one on one time as each year passes. They have a finite timeline of required care.
The elderly become less and less independant, the care they require becomes more and more medical in nature, and there is no timeline. Someone with dementia can require around the clock medical care for decades.
Yes, the medical care is 1000x more than cost of food and things.
An infant requires more constant care than a dying elderly. Parents are on rotation 24/7 for the first year. That’s more than elderly get in hospice.
Moneywise it’s $600k for a child. $400k from parents. $200k from the state for the free k-12 education.
Elderly on average have $200k in savings age 65-74 and spend $155k in medical costs their last 3 years.
Children are more expensive in money and direct labor.
yes and theres more old poeple than children, thats like, the whole point of the post??
Not really. The unique expense for a kid is education compared to the old, and elder care can easily eclipse that.
Cost per child is $300k, $400k including college. The state (which means workers’ taxes) chip in an average of $17k / year for k-12 which is another $200k. That’s $600k per child, not including the free labor from the parents.
The average savings for someone 65-74 is $200k. End of life costs are $155k for the last 3 years.
…uhh… do you have ANY citation for those numbers?
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cost-to-raise-a-child-300000-us-state-by-state/
https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statistics
I used low numbers of ranges and rounded down.
So you just said about 20 years of life is only twice that of the last three years of life for your starting figure. Add in college and it’s still not that egregiously more.
You feel the need to add public school costs, but not add in medicare, social security, and other expenses exclusive to old age.
The unique expense for a kid is education
Young kids require a lot of health care, tbf
I said unique, old people need a lot of health care, generally way more than a kid. Most kids after birth just have routine checkups and not much else. Infants might get a bit more doctor visits because the parents don’t know if they should worry or not because the infant can’t speak, but generally even those amount to nothing.
Babies more universally need diapers than old folks, and do eat more than an older person, but health care is absolutely bigger for elderly.
There’s too many people on this fucking planet.
There’s really not. The human ecological footprint changes enormously by region. Relatively small populations in countries like Qatar and Brunei punch well outside their weight class in terms of ecological devestation.
A much smaller population that lived at this degree of population and destruction would be no better globally.
There’s really not. The human ecological footprint changes enormously by region. Relatively small populations in countries like Qatar and Brunei punch well outside their weight class in terms of ecological devestation.
Yeah, uh, the oil produced by those small populations is used in places like China, Europe and Australia too. In fact they export most of their oil, so we all share that blame.
Since more people in the world are in China and India you are probably wrong about it being the Bible. It is religious texts that encourage more reproduction for religious spreading to the masses and China just has more landmass so more people overall
Senior citizens do not out number young people, however there is almost as many senior citizens as young people and that may be some cause for concern
Young kids, not all young people.
Infinite growth of human population would hit a hard ceiling on earth resources real soon.
People not having babies is a good thing.
It’s not about infinite growth.
Given that not everyone lives to old age, we would expect children to outnumber old people even in a zero (or slightly negative) percent growth scenario.
Sure but lets allow the world population to naturally contract to 500 million or so before we start pushing for replacement numbers
The 1st 40years of my life i was told I had to worry about over population, in the last 5 I’ve been told I now need to worry about “demographic collapse”
Right on. The way the way population is right now, every time a chunk of mountain or glacier falls down, or a river floods, tens of thousands die or are displaced.
In 1960 there were 2-3 billion people on the planet. Now it’s 3x as many cars, mouths to feed, homes to heat/cool.
In Bangladesh there are over 1 million Rohingan refugees who’ve been there for TEN YEARS. They can’t work there, have no country to move to, have to live on $6-12 a month for food.
I agree. I chose not to have kids for various reasons. And my “skilled” lol trade skills will die with me.
It’ll be fine. The baby boom our grandparents cane from was an anomaly
Baby boomers also had more kids than the generation that preceded them. So did Gen X. Millennials are the first to fail to even replace their own population.
They’re slow off the mark, averaging 27-28 for the first child rather than 22.
I am so glad I didn’t knock up who I thought I was forever with in my 20s or 30s. I would be even more miserable now and would have miserable people depending on me.
The US baby boom is not really meaningful on a global scale
Nice vagina
Sure, but only the inner lips of the labia matter
Minora supremacist
Those juniors are good for nothing either way! oh, wait…
Sounds like a situation that will self correct in a few decades, no?
People live longer every decade and the definition of Senior Citizen doesn’t change. This would not be a bad fact on its own…but declining birth rates can cause many issues.
Not really, unless Gen Z starts having a fuckload of babies soon. Because each generation will be progressively smaller if the fertility rates don’t rise.
It’s not a huge issue in the third world where your kids are your retirement plan anyway so they have a ton more children. In the developed world, we have pension systems and stuff so on an individual level, having kids is likely bad for you financially, you want other people to have kids so you don’t have to spend a bunch of money raising them, but their taxes pay for your retirement.
Just funnel money from billionaires into it and problem solved. We can keep the aame money in circulation, half the population, and be fine. I see no issue with lowering birth rates, and wvery issue with a lack of policy changes surrounding it
Unless there’s some horrible disaster in the coming decades that will kill billions and harm wealthy old people less.
People think we need to keep growing the population. We’re stuck on a single planet together. If we could live on the moon or Mars it would be a different story, but I think it’s perfectly fine to decrease the population size back to 1980s levels, at least.
And we’re talking about the elderly who don’t add any productivity to the planet too.
Sure, some minority of boomers have a good attitude and want to work for the planet and the future generations, but the reality is that a majority of them have piss poor values and are now a net drain on society.
Plenty of people in other age groups that are also a net drain on society. We won’t get far if we don’t see it as the class issue that it mostly is.
Other age groups don’t entire half the damn economy. Boomers are a class unto themselves.
Billionaires collectively own about 10 trillion in the US, Boomers collectively over 80 trillion.
Just going with the US because it’s the best known example. It’s not very dissimilar in other western countries but the US is the worst I believe.
Ua the issue isnt age groups but the distribution of resources and access to political power of different classes.
An 89 year old member of their local community centre will always be more useful to the humanity , and evem the planet , than a 29 year old billionaire lol
Technically, probably yes, one way or another…
People live longer. 100 years ago 50 year old man was old.
Yes people live a little longer. but the main average that skews average life expectancy/longevity numbers is today fewer babies and mothers die during and post birth.
