I suppose house prices dropping are pretty terrible if you see your house only as an investment, instead of a roof over your head. I know people who would be fucked in their retirement if they house price falls, because they've gambled on their house price climbing enough to carry them through retirement.
I hope they get hurt though. Treating housing as an investment that needs to turn a profit, while people are living on the streets is fucking insane.
Just saving gold has been a realistic option for all of living memory. Nobody needs gold. One is not depriving others of the resources they need to live by raising its price.
They have to decline or stabalise at fucking point, since we cant have 10 trillion people or something on the planet. Truthfully we just need the brains to figure out how to run our economy without an unending supply of increasing labour.
Some people cannot fathom the concept of limited resources. They think you can increase human population exponentially forever and it'll just work out somehow
No. The physics does not allow this. Physics does allow interstellar travel and colonization. However, the resources required are immense. To transport a single human being between star systems would require more energy than it would take to keep them alive in decadent luxury for centuries. We're talking hard limits of physics here. Sure, you can imagine this will be solved by some magical technology outside the known laws of physics, like a perpetual motion machine, but you could then just as easily imagine using that magical technology to keep people alive back at home.
Interstellar colonization would be a wonderful idea, but simply as a means of backing up life. And spreading life through the universe has value in and of itself. It's a wonderful thing to yearn for.
But interstellar travel has absolutely zero utility as a means of addressing population growth.
Oh, and you can only have so many humans living in any given volume of space before the raw output of their body heat cooks them all alive. Regardless of your tech, there are only so many humans you can cram into a volume the size of the solar system.
uhh, yeah, travel takes a whole lot of resources, but you'd only need to transport very few elements around, like a seed of a tree. and when you land on a new planet, you have more resources to utilize and go on. so your image is too limited here.
Please read the thread carefully. You're fundamentally misunderstanding the context of this discussion. We aren't talking about interstellar travel in general. We're talking specifically about the utility of using interstellar travel as a means of keeping exponential growth going forever.
The species can keep growing by extending out to the stars, but an individual star system can't. Eventually your star system reaches a maximum population. In the age of European imperialism, Europe shipped its excess population off to settler colonies Australia and the Americas. That will never be possible between star systems. In the 1800s, Britain could lower its resource demand by sending people off to the Americas. It took far more resources to keep a person alive for their lifetime than it did to send someone across the ocean. But you save no net resources by shipping someone off to Alpha Centauri. Sol will not be able to solve an overpopulation problem by shipping people off to distant Suns. And it's not a matter of how much cargo you bring with. The energy required to move just your body across interstellar distances dwarfs what is required to keep you alive for many lifetimes.
So, no, population cannot grow forever. Eventually Sol will have to stabilize its birth rates, or it will have a problem. Starting new seed colonies around distant stars can probably be done. But it won't allow the population or economy of a single star system to keep growing forever. With interstellar colonization, you're not expanding your civilization to multiple star systems, you're budding off new independent civilizations around those distant Suns.
A seed is actually a perfect metaphor for interstellar colonization. A tree can throw a seed to the wind to make new trees far away, but those seeds don't help that original tree grow any bigger.
Yep, but it would take careful planning. Like, actually listen to the smart people who know how to design a long-term sustainable system, rather than just chasing profit at all costs.
It's not even that hard to do, just let people do the right thing. Every researcher that says "we could fix this", we automatically assume that voice will be ignored at best or crushed at worst, but it doesn't have to be this way.
Exxon mobil knew climate change would have devasting effects decades ago. But it wasnt profitable within their lifetimes to admit that or do anything about it
We could easily support our current population and quite a bit more if we actually respected and shared our resources responsibly.
I think this is a monumentally bad argument. Statistically, you are typing this from a computer or smartphone, with internet access, and are probably part of the segment of humanity that consumes the most resources (as am I). You are saying that if we want to have 15, 20, 30 billion people, we can all just live like the most impoverished people in the world and it will be fine.
It's a quality vs. quantity problem. Maximizing human numbers means we must have very low per-person consumption to minimize impact. Maximizing quality of life means we can all eat/travel/live/consume how we want and the environmental impact will still be low (but with fewer people). I think that's far more desirable.
EDIT: to distill down the argument further - you support voluntarily decreasing your standard of living, so that we can grow the population more, for the benefit of.... ? Creating lives that have not yet been born and can't care?
Whatever you want, I personally do not want a decrease in my standard of living, and especially not to feed the capitalist machine that requires growth at all costs. I presume, if faced with a real and present choice of the same kind, most people would choose to uphold their standard of living instead of sacrificing, only so that more billions of people can be born. When is it enough? Do we really NEED 8B+ people? I wouldn't mind living in a world of <1B people where everyone has luxury and plenty without destroying the planet in the process. We can't get there, but the principle still holds. Put resources into solving the problem of elder care, and just let the population decline naturally.
It's not that they're afraid of society collapsing. They clearly don't care about that, as most of what they do ignores that.
What they're worried about is the "Great Replacement", where white people become a minority. If that wasn't what they were really afraid of, then they would consider the problem of declining birth rates to be easily solvable with immigration.
I hear this all the time, and it seems to ignore the glaring elephant in the room. When talking about whether you can keep an economic system going, what matters is not the ratio of workers to retirees, but the ratio of workers to dependents. Yes, we have more old people for each worker, but we also have fewer children. We can simply shift resources from child care to elder care. You manufacture more adult diapers and fewer infant diapers. More nurses go into gerentology than neonatal care. You shift government funding from elementary schools to pensions. More women can stay in the workforce, because fewer of us are having children. And those that do are having fewer of them.
We know that economies can adapt to rapidly growing populations. We've survived baby booms just fine. After WW2, in the US, we suddenly had to care for far more children than our system was ever built to handle. Yet we managed to muddle through it. If we can adapt to a baby boom, we can adapt to a slowly aging population. Capitalism, for all its flaws, does have some benefits. And one of those is that it's pretty efficient at reallocating resources based on changing demand.
And honestly, there are some real upsides to declining population. We can ease our impact on the environment. The real cost of housing will decline. Scarcer workers will see their wages rise. This is the real reason the billionaires are so afraid of a declining population. They need millions of desperate people struggling just to scrape by. Do you think Amazon could run its hellish warehouses the way it does if the cost of housing was half what it currently is?
That all assumes people will not be living longer in the future.
The real cost of housing will decline.
Children generally live with their parents. We'd have to all start living with our elderly parents for it to be the same in terms of housing costs.
This is the real reason the billionaires are so afraid of a declining population. They need millions of desperate people struggling just to scrape by. Do you think Amazon could run its hellish warehouses the way it does if the cost of housing was half what it currently is?
You shouldn't assume billionaires are that intelligent. A huge amount of money has been invested into AI on the promise that it will take away people's jobs. billionaires are emotionally driven idiots. They learned from Jack Welch that if you cut jobs, line goes up. Therefore if you cut half of all the jobs, line goes up big. They're small minded people that don't think in terms of how the economy functions, they only care about their businesses.
If it were the case billionaires had some over arching plan for the economy, then Jeff Bezos would be thinking that if everyone were more prosperous, people would be buying more stuff from Amazon, wouldn't he?
They just want a bigger percentage of the pie, they don't care if the entire pie is smaller and in absolute terms a smaller percent of a bigger pie is more than a larger percent of a smaller pie. Why would they? They already have more money than they could ever spend, so they're obsessed with having more power than their competitors. Racking up a high score and gaining more power.
But your (our?) generation won't outnumber young people if young people keep immigrating. Not that "keep foisting the burden of perpetual growth on the young" is ACTUALLY a good plan, but it's exactly the kind of selfish arch-capitalist thinking that they'd be all in favor of if it was white young people.
Also can't oppress some wage slaves to to generate wealth for them if they are never born, it's all about money at the end, white supremacy is a secondary concern
The world is literally on fire due to climate change, numerous wars and conflicts with global repercussions, and everything is getting more expensive, while people see that politics - which is supposed to serve society - is subservient only to its masters in the business world. Overpopulation has also become an increasingly pressing issue. The outlook is bleak. Why on earth would anyone want to bring children into this real-life dystopia and deliberately subject them to this?!
20 years ago my wife and decided it was not going to happen and back then it was like. thinks don't look like they are going well economically and with the environment and our personal finances just aren't adding up. fast forward to now and best decision ever. It was debatable 20 years ago but now you have to be crazy.
Quite honestly, I doubt that has any bearing on it. Realistically speaking, it wasn't that much better during the cold war, and that generation had kids. And climate change is not something most people plan their groceries around, let alone their future family.
Because the alternative is just letting your gene line or even the whole species die? Theres also some people that still believe, and probably can succeed, that they can raise kids resilient enough to face those challenges and brave enough to tackle them. If in 40 years governments finally wanna do something about climate change, they're gonna need some younger hands and boots on the ground to get it done.
Not all of us were raised in a decent life. There are people who grew up in war, slavery, and all sorts of worse shit. They eventually escaped and made a decent life for themselves. Why wouldn't they believe their children could do the same?
In 40 years, correcting course will be even harder than it is today. Climate change is a compounding problem. Once the ice sheets are gone, they're not coming back in any time scale we can imagine.
raise kids resilient enough to face those challenges and brave enough to tackle them.
Just kicking the can down the road, like the generations before us. I'm imagining the Lion King scene, except instead of showing Simba a bountiful wilderness to inherent, it's a scene full of trash under a burning sky.
"Everything the light touches will be yours to fix. Good luck."
My assumption is if you're rasing kids to take on those challeneges, you aren't one of the can kickers. Global problems take near global effort. Its not like "well son we tried nothing and now its on you." Its more like "here son become educated on whats happening, these are the things we've done individually to try to make a change and have a more sustainable mindset, now grab that brick and your picket sign theres a protest this morning."
Yes, just let the gene line die who cares we're not that special, humanity won't mourn our loss. That's all part of the brainwashing, like you have to have kids because your parents and grandparents did? Of course not, live life as you see fit doesn't matter that your ancestors chose what was best for them.
Thinking ones genes are so irreplacable is so incredibly narcissistic. Like, the world couldn't possibly become a great place without specifically MY genes.
And if we're thinking in evolutionary time, evolution as we know it is already over. Designer babies likely already exist. Genetic engineering is the biggest thing since sex.
Reality check. We are in ZERO danger of extinction. Our population could decline by 95%, and there would still be more humans alive than when Julius Caesar walked the Earth. Extinction would take millennia. But even then, there are built in safe guards that make declining below a certain population level impossible.
For a start, consider natural selection. societies are not homogeneous. Some groups reproduce at above replacement, some below. In the US for example, if we just assume birth rates remain the same for all groups indefinitely, never returning to an average replacement rate? In that unlikely scenario, extinction still will not happen. The Amish and the Mormons shall inherit the Earth.
And this can happen for cultural practices, not just religious groups. Maybe multi-generational households will become more common through natural selection. Maybe it will become the norm for people to have children right after high school, while still living with their parents. You only go to college and start your career after having some kids. Each generation pays to raise their own grandchildren, rather than their own children.
And even without cultural selection, eventually technological decline will prevent extinction. What technology your society can wield is a function of its population. As your population shrinks, your society's technological complexity decreases. Eventually you can no longer manufacture mechanized farming equipment, so more people have to work the land again. And on traditional family farms, children are an economic resource that pay for themselves. So the birth rate recovers. And of course, reliable birth control is the product of industrial production. Eventually your population shrinks enough that you are no longer capable of running a birth control factory.
I don't want to see the country become entirely Amish or to see us collapse back to 18th century levels of technology. But these are just the worst case scenarios. The absolute worse case scenario is that population declines by 90-95% and we regress technologically to some 18th century equivalent. Not a future I want to see, but it would hardly be the end of the world. Our present industrial civilization would be remembered as an unsustainable historical aberration, a temporary population boom brought on by the era of cheap hydrocarbons.
I do see your points about the resilience, but to assume total population collapse is IMPOSSIBLE is wrong. Many species on this planet have become extinct and we are not immune to that, locally nor globally. The amish may struggle when crop failure and extreme weather becomes more common place due to changing climates or pollution levels. They might make a bad year or two, but several bad years in a row could significantly reduce populations, possibly to the point of poor genetic diversity where after a few generations certain diseases or conditions wipe them out. They could also just be murdered by hungry stragglers of modern society armed with assault rifles that take their farms without knowing how to sustainably run them.
And also those amish will still have to be having kids despite how bleak their future looks which was the ultimate point of my comment. No kids = no humanity.
We already know from millennia of history that the human population can be maintained just fine at pre-industrial technology and population levels. Sure crop failures happened, but they don't happen everywhere at the same time. Famines were historically very localized things.
And if we're talking complete climate collapse? In that scenario, everything goes out the window. If that's the scenario you want to plan for, then we should be doing everything we can to shrink our numbers as fast as humanly possible.
Humans are by far the most resilient species on this planet. We've learned to live everywhere from burning arid deserts to frozen arctic wastes. We will be the last species on this planet aside from some bacteria that go extinct.
We literally cannot be the last species aside from bacteria to go extinct because we eat other species. We rely on plants and often animals to provide our nutrition. We rely on pollinators for plants to grow fruits and vegetables. We were able to survive those harsh environments because they could provide for us. There is no living in the artic without the seals for example.
This is also the fastest our climate has ever changed. Yes the climate has changed in the past but never ar the rate it is now which could cause widespread species collapse, likely becoming earth's largest extinction event to date. We have no idea the extents that current climate changes impacts will have on us in 100 years, let alone the fact its still getting worse as there is a significant lag time in terms of the effects.
Sure. But again, if you're planning for climate collapse, it's a complete uncertainty. Really the only thing that we can do now that would reliably increase our chances of survival is to shrink our current population peacefully as rapidly as possible. If you're worried about climate collapse, you should be dancing with joy at a declining population. Fewer people means fewer emissions and less land taken up by human activities.
This is a good point. A lot of it to me is one experiencing an advanced level of human progression and relative peace and two seeing the awefulness that some people put up with and three seeing the massive widening of wealth disparity. If it was a situation where we just had the environmental challenges but society had progressed to a more equitable situation I could see it but then our environmental challenges would not be as great as they are. In addition if we were in a state where we had stabilized our population and was working to degrow to a level that was sustainable long term. Then it would make sense.
While I understand the reason why a demographic dropout would be a catastrophe, I fucking hate how they say it's our fault, when they were the ones who fucked up everything in the first place
I'll spot you "they" as the endless white nationalist nags and natalist pundits. For some reason "population collapse" never shows up as a concern for Palestinians or Cubans or Bangledeshis or Congolese. It's only ever a rich white European problem.
But this endless "I didn't start the fire" rhetoric kinda ignores how the prior generation as a whole had about as much control over their material conditions as we do now. Just being mad at The Olds neglects how many of them delivered the education and health care and technology and agriculture that brought us to the modern moment [in a good way].
Not to be all "you hate capitalism and yet cell phone" but you gotta see the prior generation as the same group of disaffected working class as we have in the modern day.
Ffs, our parents were inundated with "Overpopulation" as the crisis du jour. They were lectured over having too many kids and having kids when they were too young and not being economically independent enough to care for anyone but themselves. We inherited that from them and internalized it. And now we meticulously practice contraception because we've been drilled to believe it's the responsible thing to do.
Only post-COVID have we really seen the Natalist Panic taking off. It's a complete 180⁰ and largely the product of Millennial insecurities.
It's interesting because it's obvious that the reason why people are having less children is because they can't afford it and they don't think it's a good idea for the children.
However, rather than actually remedying this situation, the people who want us to have as many children as humanly possible so they have more workers are doing everything in their power to make life worse.
We are in a shitty pay to win permadeath coop mmorpg where the game balance has been totally broken by indivualistic whales. Of course no new players want to subscribe to this shit.
The rich already decided they don't want to prevent this, they'd rather just replace everyone underneath them. That's why the AI bubble just won't pop even though its a blackhole for money
Republicans will simply declare that child birth is the patriotic duty of every American woman of healthy reproductive capacity. Men will be drafted to war. Women will be drafted into childbirth via forced artificial insemination. Legally speaking, if a man can be drafted to give up his life and sacrifice his body "for the greater good of the nation," there's little reason that a woman couldn't be drafted for forced birth. If your government can force you to die for your country, your government can force you to give birth for your country.
You think it's gonna be forced artificial insemination in that scenario? It's absolutely going to go back to the times where women have to marry bc they're not allowed to own anything (land, bank account, their own bodies) and marital rape won't be considered real bc husband's own their wives. Of course, this is if the fascists get their way. Given how the left has been rising up and voting in actual leftists/socialists in the primaries these last few months, the fascists are going to have actual opposition rather than just controlled opposition corpo dems
There's been a rash of people like Elon Musk posting rants about "declining birth rates in the developing world" (and sometimes dog whistling while at it) - getting upset that contrary to the worries of Malthus and Ehrlich, it turns out humans are not the same as bacteria in a petri dish just exponentially reproducing until they exhaust all the carrying capacity of their environment. Instead, it seems that those of us that are in paradigms where we have relatively high per capita energy and materials consumption, respond to economic, cultural and environmental stimuli, and slow our roll once we feel we are at an "x" threshold of population density and environmental & economic stress.
Given that we live on a finite planet with finite resources this small bit of self control might just be what saves humanity from a truly dystopian future.
What the demographic shift of less younger workers versus more retiring seniors does mean is that our systems of depending on constant growth of consumption for our faith in our currency and financial institutions, and for providing for government guaranteed retirement funding, both end up under threat - but those issues could still be easily fixed simply by allowing more immigration from the multitude of places on this globe that still have relatively high birth rates, that have plenty of people with strong work ethics seeking greater opportunities.
I really like how you connected the birth rates and excessive consumerism as a self-fulfilling prophecy. As capitalism reaches its apex, motivations for increasing birth rate collapse. As birth rates collapse, excessive consumerism stagnates, because people can't afford to retire.
Immigration is really irrelevant to this discussion. Every country is rapidly aging, including the poorer countries that currently have above-replacement birth rates. We're all going down the same path. Some nations are just further along the path than others. Unless there's a large population of Martians eager to immigrate that I'm not aware of, immigration is not a long term solution to this.
Total population across the planet is most certainly still climbing each and every year - significantly. And prior history (e.g. USA during the Ellis lsland era circa 1890-1924) shows allowing & enabling immigration most certainly can be a way of markedly improving economic outlooks for not just the immigrants but also the prior residents - for at least the next few decades, if not a good bit beyond that, perhaps even into the next century.
And as for beyond that - again, my take is we should be celebrating that it looks like humanity, is not going blindly pop out babies beyond the carrying capacity of our planet.
Of course we likely could be facing massive challenges due to climate change and idiotic policies being dictated by short sighted oligarchies. But at least it looks like the kind of overpopulation overshoot that was feared by lots of 20th century analysts might get avoided due to some arguably rational reactions by younger generations to the world they now find themselves in.
Given that we live on a finite planet with finite resources this small bit of self control might just be what saves humanity from a truly dystopian future.
I don't think it's a planetary limit we're hitting. Population expansion is highest in parts of the world with some of the worst living conditions.
A lot boils down to access to contraception. Take that away and all those horny teenagers will fuck out more babies, because hormones override any kind of logical long term economic understanding.
Controversial, but I dont think overpopulation is the problem folks think it is. More hands can mean more trees planted and more wind turbines built as much as it means oil refineries. Overpopulation is only an issue if you're coasting off shared resources.
we use close to two earths a year unsustainably right now. Sustainably we will have to use much less especially given the head room that will be necessary for biosphere healing. We are totally overpopulated for our current situation. The idea that we will destroy it more to figure out how to do it better is not a rational way of thinking.
That's not an overpopulation problem that's a united statesian uses ten times the resources of the average human problem. And yes, population scientists are confidently predicting we're going to max out at 13-15 billion people based on birth rates declining in the future. So overpopulation will never be a problem. The problem is overconsumption in particular large countries.
Yes, I get it, beating on the US is a fun thing to do, especially right now. But if you think there's anything particularly wicked or decadent about Americans by nature, then you're no different than the countless racist despots that have caused untold human misery through the ages. Every time someone makes an assumption that another group of people is somehow more evil by nature, that assumption has been proven wrong again and again. People are just people.
What you're missing is that while the US does currently use an outsized amount of resources, we only do so because we are wealthy. If tomorrow everyone in the US dropped dead, the cost of various resources would decline, but all those resources would still be used. Sure a more globally equitable distribution of resources would be a good thing, but it won't do anything to help humanity's total environmental impact.
Earth has 8 billion people on it. The poorest 7 billion are scraping and scratching as hard as they can to live the same lifestyle as the richest 1 billion.
There's a lot here to unpack, and it conflates things that don't really make sense to conflate. Like, Americans using too many resources being a wealth issue is circular because wealth means resources. Maybe to make the perspective of others more clear, we're saying that this zero-sum understanding of resource managment fails to account that resources can be recycled, and that their recycling is economically stimulating because it's a form of resource capture. Manage the resources as necessary for the global population (with slack of course for emergencies) and keeping them on a closed loop. It's possible, but is not an exploitive practice so its mechanisms arent easily exploitable. That's the real issue. Humans only seem to gather and work together when there's a possibility that any one of them can become a god king and get visits to whatever the modern Epstein Island is.
You're arguing that progress requires death. We're arguing that it requires effort and intentionality.
We're too close to matrix timeline for that. People will be pushed financially to sell their sperm and eggs to the government or a corporation for money so they can survive and that corporation will then grow a new generation of AI prompt givers.
We will also see things like further pushes against abortion, more lenient rape laws and other awful shit to pump up the births. There could also be importing births from other countries in the form of immigration. As we've seen with climate change, governments and corporations ultimately won't care about declining births regardless of how unsustainable it is.
Epicurus rejected any possibility of an afterlife, while still contending that one need not fear death: "Death is nothing to us; for that which is dissolved, is without sensation, and that which lacks sensation is nothing to us."[72] From this doctrine arose the Epicurean Epitaph: Non fui, fui, non sum, non curo ("I was not; I was; I am not; I do not care."), which is inscribed on the gravestones of his followers and seen on many ancient gravestones of the Roman Empire.[73]
In 20 years its stabilized tho, just gotta get over the baby boomers bump right? that are creating gray pressure on health and housing rn, soon a lot of people will inherit their gold, rich stay rich, tax inheritance. Japan is a glimpse in our future, they have to work 60 hours, and focus on automation and rely heavily on immigration even tho they don't want to.
The area under the curve above 65 vs the area under the curve below 65 is the issue when combined with all of our institutions and social contracts being designed for endless growth
50% of all new homeless people in the US are above 55 years old which should tell you how this is going to go. It's not going to be like Japan for most western nations. Japan is the best case scenario.
Okay I’m gonna play devil’s advocate, it’s worrying because we are not adapting our system.
I’ve always thought over population is a big issue but when I found out how our social security is intentionally a Ponzi scheme, it made me very worried.
I don’t give two shits about the replacement theory but I’m worried that I am getting paid shit throughout my adult life since labour isn’t expensive yet but when if I need to retire, labour could become super expensive.
Of course a sane society would just use all the excess wealth today to invest in automation but if we were sane, a lot of things would be better.
Yeah I fully expect not to receive a state pension in the UK, the Ponzi-like economics of it just don’t work for an aging population with a falling birth rate.
The problem is that the government which brings in sustainability measures around this will be electorally annihilated for a generation at least, so the can keeps getting kicked down the road and the likelihood of events forcing a change rather than an orderly change in plenty of time increases.
Even if AI doesn't reach the highs of science fiction, it will allow one person to do the work of many. Labor prices will probably keep going down for decades.
Alternatively they can assure more children by crashing the economy so hard people will be forced to have like 9 children so that there's a chance that at least 2 of them can take care of their parents when they get old.
That's how Trump decided to make America great again. It's gonna be frontier lynchings, robber barons and slave trades all over again.
I'd blame contraception. And by blame I mean celebrate.
But the idea that teenagers aren't fucking because Capitalism really undersells the impact of hormones. Kids fucked under feudalism. They fucked under theocracy. They fucked as serfs and slaves. They fucked as cave people. The mode of production isn't what's at issue.
Birth rates in North Korea are still below replacement level, same as South Korea. Some of the highest birthrates in the world are happening in active war zones. Some of the lowest in the safest and wealthiest.
I don't think over population is the issue or under. It's the dated, old systems we continue to rely on. I think we have a energy, and transport problem. We are scaling 1800s and 1900s tech. Instead of innovating modern approaches. We have a systems issues.
108 Comments
Ilovethebomb@sh.itjust.works · 120 pts · 1d
Declining birth rates and house prices dropping are both things the media love to make out are terrible things.
And they just aren't.
MBech@feddit.dk · 16 pts · 1d
I suppose house prices dropping are pretty terrible if you see your house only as an investment, instead of a roof over your head. I know people who would be fucked in their retirement if they house price falls, because they've gambled on their house price climbing enough to carry them through retirement.
I hope they get hurt though. Treating housing as an investment that needs to turn a profit, while people are living on the streets is fucking insane.
explodicle@sh.itjust.works · 2 pts · 1h
Just saving gold has been a realistic option for all of living memory. Nobody needs gold. One is not depriving others of the resources they need to live by raising its price.
The same can't be said for housing.
gandalf_der_13te@feddit.org · 2 pts · 1d
and guess who own's the media's editorial circle?
minty@aussie.zone · 64 pts · 1d
They have to decline or stabalise at fucking point, since we cant have 10 trillion people or something on the planet. Truthfully we just need the brains to figure out how to run our economy without an unending supply of increasing labour.
Zarobi@aussie.zone · 42 pts · 1d
Some people cannot fathom the concept of limited resources. They think you can increase human population exponentially forever and it'll just work out somehow
FireRetardant@lemmy.world · 36 pts · 1d
We could easily support our current population and quite a bit more if we actually respected and shared our resources responsibly.
HonoraryMancunian@lemmy.world · 11 pts · 1d
Hell, we could increase exponentially forever if we wanted. The universe is practically infinite
WoodScientist@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 1d
No. The physics does not allow this. Physics does allow interstellar travel and colonization. However, the resources required are immense. To transport a single human being between star systems would require more energy than it would take to keep them alive in decadent luxury for centuries. We're talking hard limits of physics here. Sure, you can imagine this will be solved by some magical technology outside the known laws of physics, like a perpetual motion machine, but you could then just as easily imagine using that magical technology to keep people alive back at home.
Interstellar colonization would be a wonderful idea, but simply as a means of backing up life. And spreading life through the universe has value in and of itself. It's a wonderful thing to yearn for.
But interstellar travel has absolutely zero utility as a means of addressing population growth.
Oh, and you can only have so many humans living in any given volume of space before the raw output of their body heat cooks them all alive. Regardless of your tech, there are only so many humans you can cram into a volume the size of the solar system.
gandalf_der_13te@feddit.org · 0 pts · 1d
uhh, yeah, travel takes a whole lot of resources, but you'd only need to transport very few elements around, like a seed of a tree. and when you land on a new planet, you have more resources to utilize and go on. so your image is too limited here.
WoodScientist@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 1d
Please read the thread carefully. You're fundamentally misunderstanding the context of this discussion. We aren't talking about interstellar travel in general. We're talking specifically about the utility of using interstellar travel as a means of keeping exponential growth going forever.
The species can keep growing by extending out to the stars, but an individual star system can't. Eventually your star system reaches a maximum population. In the age of European imperialism, Europe shipped its excess population off to settler colonies Australia and the Americas. That will never be possible between star systems. In the 1800s, Britain could lower its resource demand by sending people off to the Americas. It took far more resources to keep a person alive for their lifetime than it did to send someone across the ocean. But you save no net resources by shipping someone off to Alpha Centauri. Sol will not be able to solve an overpopulation problem by shipping people off to distant Suns. And it's not a matter of how much cargo you bring with. The energy required to move just your body across interstellar distances dwarfs what is required to keep you alive for many lifetimes.
So, no, population cannot grow forever. Eventually Sol will have to stabilize its birth rates, or it will have a problem. Starting new seed colonies around distant stars can probably be done. But it won't allow the population or economy of a single star system to keep growing forever. With interstellar colonization, you're not expanding your civilization to multiple star systems, you're budding off new independent civilizations around those distant Suns.
A seed is actually a perfect metaphor for interstellar colonization. A tree can throw a seed to the wind to make new trees far away, but those seeds don't help that original tree grow any bigger.
HubertManne@piefed.social · 0 pts · 1d
yeah and since alls we need is the vaccum of space to thrive its definately doable.
Zarobi@aussie.zone · 4 pts · 1d
Yep, but it would take careful planning. Like, actually listen to the smart people who know how to design a long-term sustainable system, rather than just chasing profit at all costs.
It's not even that hard to do, just let people do the right thing. Every researcher that says "we could fix this", we automatically assume that voice will be ignored at best or crushed at worst, but it doesn't have to be this way.
FireRetardant@lemmy.world · 9 pts · 1d
Exxon mobil knew climate change would have devasting effects decades ago. But it wasnt profitable within their lifetimes to admit that or do anything about it
rexxit@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 23h
I think this is a monumentally bad argument. Statistically, you are typing this from a computer or smartphone, with internet access, and are probably part of the segment of humanity that consumes the most resources (as am I). You are saying that if we want to have 15, 20, 30 billion people, we can all just live like the most impoverished people in the world and it will be fine.
It's a quality vs. quantity problem. Maximizing human numbers means we must have very low per-person consumption to minimize impact. Maximizing quality of life means we can all eat/travel/live/consume how we want and the environmental impact will still be low (but with fewer people). I think that's far more desirable.
EDIT: to distill down the argument further - you support voluntarily decreasing your standard of living, so that we can grow the population more, for the benefit of.... ? Creating lives that have not yet been born and can't care?
Whatever you want, I personally do not want a decrease in my standard of living, and especially not to feed the capitalist machine that requires growth at all costs. I presume, if faced with a real and present choice of the same kind, most people would choose to uphold their standard of living instead of sacrificing, only so that more billions of people can be born. When is it enough? Do we really NEED 8B+ people? I wouldn't mind living in a world of <1B people where everyone has luxury and plenty without destroying the planet in the process. We can't get there, but the principle still holds. Put resources into solving the problem of elder care, and just let the population decline naturally.
Leviathan@lemmy.world · 59 pts · 1d
Don't care, I'm not producing wage slaves.
HubertManne@piefed.social · 9 pts · 1d
yeah basically. im actually fine with my genetic line going out if the earth goes on with a vibrant biosphere as well.
SethTaylor@lemmy.world · 49 pts · 1d
Spoiler alert: they'll just ban contraception, abortion and sex ed instead
Elting@piefed.social · 29 pts · 1d
Jokes on them, I’m not having any sex.
socsa@piefed.social · 4 pts · 1d
Meh, can't have a baby in the mouth or the butt.
Tango@piefed.ca · 42 pts · 1d
It's not that they're afraid of society collapsing. They clearly don't care about that, as most of what they do ignores that.
What they're worried about is the "Great Replacement", where white people become a minority. If that wasn't what they were really afraid of, then they would consider the problem of declining birth rates to be easily solvable with immigration.
OneWomanCreamTeam@sh.itjust.works · 6 pts · 1d
I mean, declining birth rates still cause problems. Even if you're sane and don't give a shit about shifting racial demographics.
Shits gonna be really rough for my generation when we're too old to take care of ourselves, while also outnumbering the young people.
WoodScientist@lemmy.world · 9 pts · 1d
I hear this all the time, and it seems to ignore the glaring elephant in the room. When talking about whether you can keep an economic system going, what matters is not the ratio of workers to retirees, but the ratio of workers to dependents. Yes, we have more old people for each worker, but we also have fewer children. We can simply shift resources from child care to elder care. You manufacture more adult diapers and fewer infant diapers. More nurses go into gerentology than neonatal care. You shift government funding from elementary schools to pensions. More women can stay in the workforce, because fewer of us are having children. And those that do are having fewer of them.
We know that economies can adapt to rapidly growing populations. We've survived baby booms just fine. After WW2, in the US, we suddenly had to care for far more children than our system was ever built to handle. Yet we managed to muddle through it. If we can adapt to a baby boom, we can adapt to a slowly aging population. Capitalism, for all its flaws, does have some benefits. And one of those is that it's pretty efficient at reallocating resources based on changing demand.
And honestly, there are some real upsides to declining population. We can ease our impact on the environment. The real cost of housing will decline. Scarcer workers will see their wages rise. This is the real reason the billionaires are so afraid of a declining population. They need millions of desperate people struggling just to scrape by. Do you think Amazon could run its hellish warehouses the way it does if the cost of housing was half what it currently is?
SpaceCowboy@lemmy.ca · 4 pts · 1d
That all assumes people will not be living longer in the future.
Children generally live with their parents. We'd have to all start living with our elderly parents for it to be the same in terms of housing costs.
You shouldn't assume billionaires are that intelligent. A huge amount of money has been invested into AI on the promise that it will take away people's jobs. billionaires are emotionally driven idiots. They learned from Jack Welch that if you cut jobs, line goes up. Therefore if you cut half of all the jobs, line goes up big. They're small minded people that don't think in terms of how the economy functions, they only care about their businesses.
If it were the case billionaires had some over arching plan for the economy, then Jeff Bezos would be thinking that if everyone were more prosperous, people would be buying more stuff from Amazon, wouldn't he?
They just want a bigger percentage of the pie, they don't care if the entire pie is smaller and in absolute terms a smaller percent of a bigger pie is more than a larger percent of a smaller pie. Why would they? They already have more money than they could ever spend, so they're obsessed with having more power than their competitors. Racking up a high score and gaining more power.
Tango@piefed.ca · 2 pts · 1d
But your (our?) generation won't outnumber young people if young people keep immigrating. Not that "keep foisting the burden of perpetual growth on the young" is ACTUALLY a good plan, but it's exactly the kind of selfish arch-capitalist thinking that they'd be all in favor of if it was white young people.
BackgrndNoize@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 22h
Also can't oppress some wage slaves to to generate wealth for them if they are never born, it's all about money at the end, white supremacy is a secondary concern
t_berium@lemmy.world · 32 pts · 1d
The world is literally on fire due to climate change, numerous wars and conflicts with global repercussions, and everything is getting more expensive, while people see that politics - which is supposed to serve society - is subservient only to its masters in the business world. Overpopulation has also become an increasingly pressing issue. The outlook is bleak. Why on earth would anyone want to bring children into this real-life dystopia and deliberately subject them to this?!
HubertManne@piefed.social · 8 pts · 1d
20 years ago my wife and decided it was not going to happen and back then it was like. thinks don't look like they are going well economically and with the environment and our personal finances just aren't adding up. fast forward to now and best decision ever. It was debatable 20 years ago but now you have to be crazy.
Tudsamfa@lemmy.world · 6 pts · 1d
Quite honestly, I doubt that has any bearing on it. Realistically speaking, it wasn't that much better during the cold war, and that generation had kids. And climate change is not something most people plan their groceries around, let alone their future family.
gandalf_der_13te@feddit.org · 1 pts · 1d
the thing that was better back then was the future. things were getting better. meanwhile now, for many people, the future looks worse.
FireRetardant@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 1d
Because the alternative is just letting your gene line or even the whole species die? Theres also some people that still believe, and probably can succeed, that they can raise kids resilient enough to face those challenges and brave enough to tackle them. If in 40 years governments finally wanna do something about climate change, they're gonna need some younger hands and boots on the ground to get it done.
Not all of us were raised in a decent life. There are people who grew up in war, slavery, and all sorts of worse shit. They eventually escaped and made a decent life for themselves. Why wouldn't they believe their children could do the same?
Whats_your_reasoning@lemmy.world · 16 pts · 1d
In 40 years, correcting course will be even harder than it is today. Climate change is a compounding problem. Once the ice sheets are gone, they're not coming back in any time scale we can imagine.
Just kicking the can down the road, like the generations before us. I'm imagining the Lion King scene, except instead of showing Simba a bountiful wilderness to inherent, it's a scene full of trash under a burning sky.
"Everything the light touches will be yours to fix. Good luck."
FireRetardant@lemmy.world · 4 pts · 1d
My assumption is if you're rasing kids to take on those challeneges, you aren't one of the can kickers. Global problems take near global effort. Its not like "well son we tried nothing and now its on you." Its more like "here son become educated on whats happening, these are the things we've done individually to try to make a change and have a more sustainable mindset, now grab that brick and your picket sign theres a protest this morning."
Again the alternative is just giving up.
Dingo_Kidneys@lemmy.today · 5 pts · 1d
I'll be raising my kids on The Anarchist's Cook Book for this reason.
explodicle@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 2h
This morning I gave my son a talk about why we're not seeing the Paw Patrol movie.
Killer57@lemmy.ca · 1 pts · 1d
Bluescluestoothpaste@sh.itjust.works · 10 pts · 1d
Yes, just let the gene line die who cares we're not that special, humanity won't mourn our loss. That's all part of the brainwashing, like you have to have kids because your parents and grandparents did? Of course not, live life as you see fit doesn't matter that your ancestors chose what was best for them.
MBech@feddit.dk · 5 pts · 1d
Thinking ones genes are so irreplacable is so incredibly narcissistic. Like, the world couldn't possibly become a great place without specifically MY genes.
My genes don't fucking matter.
explodicle@sh.itjust.works · 2 pts · 2h
And if we're thinking in evolutionary time, evolution as we know it is already over. Designer babies likely already exist. Genetic engineering is the biggest thing since sex.
WoodScientist@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 1d
Reality check. We are in ZERO danger of extinction. Our population could decline by 95%, and there would still be more humans alive than when Julius Caesar walked the Earth. Extinction would take millennia. But even then, there are built in safe guards that make declining below a certain population level impossible.
For a start, consider natural selection. societies are not homogeneous. Some groups reproduce at above replacement, some below. In the US for example, if we just assume birth rates remain the same for all groups indefinitely, never returning to an average replacement rate? In that unlikely scenario, extinction still will not happen. The Amish and the Mormons shall inherit the Earth.
And this can happen for cultural practices, not just religious groups. Maybe multi-generational households will become more common through natural selection. Maybe it will become the norm for people to have children right after high school, while still living with their parents. You only go to college and start your career after having some kids. Each generation pays to raise their own grandchildren, rather than their own children.
And even without cultural selection, eventually technological decline will prevent extinction. What technology your society can wield is a function of its population. As your population shrinks, your society's technological complexity decreases. Eventually you can no longer manufacture mechanized farming equipment, so more people have to work the land again. And on traditional family farms, children are an economic resource that pay for themselves. So the birth rate recovers. And of course, reliable birth control is the product of industrial production. Eventually your population shrinks enough that you are no longer capable of running a birth control factory.
I don't want to see the country become entirely Amish or to see us collapse back to 18th century levels of technology. But these are just the worst case scenarios. The absolute worse case scenario is that population declines by 90-95% and we regress technologically to some 18th century equivalent. Not a future I want to see, but it would hardly be the end of the world. Our present industrial civilization would be remembered as an unsustainable historical aberration, a temporary population boom brought on by the era of cheap hydrocarbons.
FireRetardant@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 1d
I do see your points about the resilience, but to assume total population collapse is IMPOSSIBLE is wrong. Many species on this planet have become extinct and we are not immune to that, locally nor globally. The amish may struggle when crop failure and extreme weather becomes more common place due to changing climates or pollution levels. They might make a bad year or two, but several bad years in a row could significantly reduce populations, possibly to the point of poor genetic diversity where after a few generations certain diseases or conditions wipe them out. They could also just be murdered by hungry stragglers of modern society armed with assault rifles that take their farms without knowing how to sustainably run them.
And also those amish will still have to be having kids despite how bleak their future looks which was the ultimate point of my comment. No kids = no humanity.
WoodScientist@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 1d
We already know from millennia of history that the human population can be maintained just fine at pre-industrial technology and population levels. Sure crop failures happened, but they don't happen everywhere at the same time. Famines were historically very localized things.
And if we're talking complete climate collapse? In that scenario, everything goes out the window. If that's the scenario you want to plan for, then we should be doing everything we can to shrink our numbers as fast as humanly possible.
Humans are by far the most resilient species on this planet. We've learned to live everywhere from burning arid deserts to frozen arctic wastes. We will be the last species on this planet aside from some bacteria that go extinct.
FireRetardant@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 1d
We literally cannot be the last species aside from bacteria to go extinct because we eat other species. We rely on plants and often animals to provide our nutrition. We rely on pollinators for plants to grow fruits and vegetables. We were able to survive those harsh environments because they could provide for us. There is no living in the artic without the seals for example.
This is also the fastest our climate has ever changed. Yes the climate has changed in the past but never ar the rate it is now which could cause widespread species collapse, likely becoming earth's largest extinction event to date. We have no idea the extents that current climate changes impacts will have on us in 100 years, let alone the fact its still getting worse as there is a significant lag time in terms of the effects.
WoodScientist@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 1d
Sure. But again, if you're planning for climate collapse, it's a complete uncertainty. Really the only thing that we can do now that would reliably increase our chances of survival is to shrink our current population peacefully as rapidly as possible. If you're worried about climate collapse, you should be dancing with joy at a declining population. Fewer people means fewer emissions and less land taken up by human activities.
FireRetardant@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 1d
We are already in an extinction event. Its not so much about if collapse but more about when and how much.
explodicle@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 2h
[laughs in water bear]
Killer57@lemmy.ca · 3 pts · 1d
We don't have 40 years.
HubertManne@piefed.social · 2 pts · 1d
This is a good point. A lot of it to me is one experiencing an advanced level of human progression and relative peace and two seeing the awefulness that some people put up with and three seeing the massive widening of wealth disparity. If it was a situation where we just had the environmental challenges but society had progressed to a more equitable situation I could see it but then our environmental challenges would not be as great as they are. In addition if we were in a state where we had stabilized our population and was working to degrow to a level that was sustainable long term. Then it would make sense.
DudleyMason@lemmy.ml · 2 pts · 1d
Found Elon's account
Kangae_Hishiryo@scribe.disroot.org · 26 pts · 1d
While I understand the reason why a demographic dropout would be a catastrophe, I fucking hate how they say it's our fault, when they were the ones who fucked up everything in the first place
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 2h
I'll spot you "they" as the endless white nationalist nags and natalist pundits. For some reason "population collapse" never shows up as a concern for Palestinians or Cubans or Bangledeshis or Congolese. It's only ever a rich white European problem.
But this endless "I didn't start the fire" rhetoric kinda ignores how the prior generation as a whole had about as much control over their material conditions as we do now. Just being mad at The Olds neglects how many of them delivered the education and health care and technology and agriculture that brought us to the modern moment [in a good way].
Not to be all "you hate capitalism and yet cell phone" but you gotta see the prior generation as the same group of disaffected working class as we have in the modern day.
Ffs, our parents were inundated with "Overpopulation" as the crisis du jour. They were lectured over having too many kids and having kids when they were too young and not being economically independent enough to care for anyone but themselves. We inherited that from them and internalized it. And now we meticulously practice contraception because we've been drilled to believe it's the responsible thing to do.
Only post-COVID have we really seen the Natalist Panic taking off. It's a complete 180⁰ and largely the product of Millennial insecurities.
farmgineer@nord.pub · 24 pts · 1d
Hey, I didn't ask to be born.
HonoraryMancunian@lemmy.world · 7 pts · 1d
I did
toynbee@piefed.social · 3 pts · 1d
Whom did you ask?
WoodScientist@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 23h
I'm just going to assume they're the character from Heinlein's All You Zombies.
toynbee@piefed.social · 1 pts · 23h
I thought there are tildes involved in that.
WoodScientist@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 22h
Yeah, but in my defense...meh.
toynbee@piefed.social · 2 pts · 22h
Well, can't argue with that.
HubertManne@piefed.social · 2 pts · 1d
"How do you dare tell me that I'm my Father's son when that was just an accident of birth?"
abbiistabbii@piefed.blahaj.zone · 24 pts · 1d
It's interesting because it's obvious that the reason why people are having less children is because they can't afford it and they don't think it's a good idea for the children.
However, rather than actually remedying this situation, the people who want us to have as many children as humanly possible so they have more workers are doing everything in their power to make life worse.
leavemealone@sh.itjust.works · 21 pts · 1d
We are in a shitty pay to win permadeath coop mmorpg where the game balance has been totally broken by indivualistic whales. Of course no new players want to subscribe to this shit.
Th4tGuyII@fedia.io · 18 pts · 1d
The rich already decided they don't want to prevent this, they'd rather just replace everyone underneath them. That's why the AI bubble just won't pop even though its a blackhole for money
mrslt@lemmy.world · 16 pts · 1d
Yup. I'm just one private citizen. The replacement ratio of my country's population is not my responsibility. 🤷♂️
WoodScientist@lemmy.world · 7 pts · 1d
Republicans will simply declare that child birth is the patriotic duty of every American woman of healthy reproductive capacity. Men will be drafted to war. Women will be drafted into childbirth via forced artificial insemination. Legally speaking, if a man can be drafted to give up his life and sacrifice his body "for the greater good of the nation," there's little reason that a woman couldn't be drafted for forced birth. If your government can force you to die for your country, your government can force you to give birth for your country.
FearMeAndDecay@literature.cafe · 3 pts · 1d
You think it's gonna be forced artificial insemination in that scenario? It's absolutely going to go back to the times where women have to marry bc they're not allowed to own anything (land, bank account, their own bodies) and marital rape won't be considered real bc husband's own their wives. Of course, this is if the fascists get their way. Given how the left has been rising up and voting in actual leftists/socialists in the primaries these last few months, the fascists are going to have actual opposition rather than just controlled opposition corpo dems
Zachariah@lemmy.world · 11 pts · 1d
"birth rates are declining" don't care l already got
bornpornSkyline969@piefed.ca · 5 pts · 1d
Psh, life? Fuck you, got mine.
Zachariah@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 1d
Psh, life? Fuck
youmyself, got mine.SPRUNTnsfw@fedinsfw.app · -7 pts · 1d
Which is why birth rates are declining.
EDIT: Jesus Christ, I forgot the /s. Sue me.
Poppa_Mo@lemmy.world · 13 pts · 1d
Birth rates are declining because it's barely affordable to take care of ourselves.
Don't try to twist the narrative into something that doesn't point fingers at the wealth hoarders.
one_old_coder@piefed.social · 8 pts · 1d
Blame it on everything else than the terrible politics of the past century? It feels like awfully executed propaganda.
socsa@piefed.social · 1 pts · 1d
Good
TotalSonic@lemmy.world · 11 pts · 1d
There's been a rash of people like Elon Musk posting rants about "declining birth rates in the developing world" (and sometimes dog whistling while at it) - getting upset that contrary to the worries of Malthus and Ehrlich, it turns out humans are not the same as bacteria in a petri dish just exponentially reproducing until they exhaust all the carrying capacity of their environment. Instead, it seems that those of us that are in paradigms where we have relatively high per capita energy and materials consumption, respond to economic, cultural and environmental stimuli, and slow our roll once we feel we are at an "x" threshold of population density and environmental & economic stress.
Given that we live on a finite planet with finite resources this small bit of self control might just be what saves humanity from a truly dystopian future.
What the demographic shift of less younger workers versus more retiring seniors does mean is that our systems of depending on constant growth of consumption for our faith in our currency and financial institutions, and for providing for government guaranteed retirement funding, both end up under threat - but those issues could still be easily fixed simply by allowing more immigration from the multitude of places on this globe that still have relatively high birth rates, that have plenty of people with strong work ethics seeking greater opportunities.
GoofSchmoofer@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 1d
But then the immigrants will take all the jobs and also not work and take all the money from citizens.
Do you even FOX bro?
stratoscaster@lemmy.world · 5 pts · 1d
Looks like it ain't developing anymore lol
I really like how you connected the birth rates and excessive consumerism as a self-fulfilling prophecy. As capitalism reaches its apex, motivations for increasing birth rate collapse. As birth rates collapse, excessive consumerism stagnates, because people can't afford to retire.
WoodScientist@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 23h
Immigration is really irrelevant to this discussion. Every country is rapidly aging, including the poorer countries that currently have above-replacement birth rates. We're all going down the same path. Some nations are just further along the path than others. Unless there's a large population of Martians eager to immigrate that I'm not aware of, immigration is not a long term solution to this.
TotalSonic@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 20h
Total population across the planet is most certainly still climbing each and every year - significantly. And prior history (e.g. USA during the Ellis lsland era circa 1890-1924) shows allowing & enabling immigration most certainly can be a way of markedly improving economic outlooks for not just the immigrants but also the prior residents - for at least the next few decades, if not a good bit beyond that, perhaps even into the next century.
And as for beyond that - again, my take is we should be celebrating that it looks like humanity, is not going blindly pop out babies beyond the carrying capacity of our planet.
Of course we likely could be facing massive challenges due to climate change and idiotic policies being dictated by short sighted oligarchies. But at least it looks like the kind of overpopulation overshoot that was feared by lots of 20th century analysts might get avoided due to some arguably rational reactions by younger generations to the world they now find themselves in.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 2h
I don't think it's a planetary limit we're hitting. Population expansion is highest in parts of the world with some of the worst living conditions.
A lot boils down to access to contraception. Take that away and all those horny teenagers will fuck out more babies, because hormones override any kind of logical long term economic understanding.
twinnie@feddit.uk · 10 pts · 1d
Overpopulation is causing so many problems; this is a good thing.
Dingo_Kidneys@lemmy.today · 3 pts · 1d
Controversial, but I dont think overpopulation is the problem folks think it is. More hands can mean more trees planted and more wind turbines built as much as it means oil refineries. Overpopulation is only an issue if you're coasting off shared resources.
HubertManne@piefed.social · 3 pts · 1d
we use close to two earths a year unsustainably right now. Sustainably we will have to use much less especially given the head room that will be necessary for biosphere healing. We are totally overpopulated for our current situation. The idea that we will destroy it more to figure out how to do it better is not a rational way of thinking.
Bluescluestoothpaste@sh.itjust.works · 2 pts · 1d
That's not an overpopulation problem that's a united statesian uses ten times the resources of the average human problem. And yes, population scientists are confidently predicting we're going to max out at 13-15 billion people based on birth rates declining in the future. So overpopulation will never be a problem. The problem is overconsumption in particular large countries.
HubertManne@piefed.social · 3 pts · 1d
we are already overpopulated. even by european, japan, korea consumption standards.
WoodScientist@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 1d
Yes, I get it, beating on the US is a fun thing to do, especially right now. But if you think there's anything particularly wicked or decadent about Americans by nature, then you're no different than the countless racist despots that have caused untold human misery through the ages. Every time someone makes an assumption that another group of people is somehow more evil by nature, that assumption has been proven wrong again and again. People are just people.
What you're missing is that while the US does currently use an outsized amount of resources, we only do so because we are wealthy. If tomorrow everyone in the US dropped dead, the cost of various resources would decline, but all those resources would still be used. Sure a more globally equitable distribution of resources would be a good thing, but it won't do anything to help humanity's total environmental impact.
Earth has 8 billion people on it. The poorest 7 billion are scraping and scratching as hard as they can to live the same lifestyle as the richest 1 billion.
Dingo_Kidneys@lemmy.today · 3 pts · 1d
There's a lot here to unpack, and it conflates things that don't really make sense to conflate. Like, Americans using too many resources being a wealth issue is circular because wealth means resources. Maybe to make the perspective of others more clear, we're saying that this zero-sum understanding of resource managment fails to account that resources can be recycled, and that their recycling is economically stimulating because it's a form of resource capture. Manage the resources as necessary for the global population (with slack of course for emergencies) and keeping them on a closed loop. It's possible, but is not an exploitive practice so its mechanisms arent easily exploitable. That's the real issue. Humans only seem to gather and work together when there's a possibility that any one of them can become a god king and get visits to whatever the modern Epstein Island is.
You're arguing that progress requires death. We're arguing that it requires effort and intentionality.
Bluescluestoothpaste@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 59m
Well for one im not in charge of anything so that's a big difference between me and a despot.
and yeah the US is currently led by one of those countless racist despots so yes that's what's happening in this country, you are correct.
FireRetardant@lemmy.world · 9 pts · 1d
We're too close to matrix timeline for that. People will be pushed financially to sell their sperm and eggs to the government or a corporation for money so they can survive and that corporation will then grow a new generation of AI prompt givers.
We will also see things like further pushes against abortion, more lenient rape laws and other awful shit to pump up the births. There could also be importing births from other countries in the form of immigration. As we've seen with climate change, governments and corporations ultimately won't care about declining births regardless of how unsustainable it is.
nonfuinoncuro@lemmy.zip · 9 pts · 21h
in a way, this is my username:
DarrinBrunner@lemmy.world · 6 pts · 1d
Billionaires are looking forward to artificial wombs to create white babies they'll own.
KingPorkChop@lemmy.ca · 4 pts · 1d
Hell, they had a private island filled with kidnapped little kids to rape.
I wouldn't be surprised if they're building another island filled with young, healthy, trafficked, white womb girls.
Puddinghelmet@lemmy.world · 6 pts · 22h
In 20 years its stabilized tho, just gotta get over the baby boomers bump right? that are creating gray pressure on health and housing rn, soon a lot of people will inherit their gold, rich stay rich, tax inheritance. Japan is a glimpse in our future, they have to work 60 hours, and focus on automation and rely heavily on immigration even tho they don't want to.
current population of Europe
Prediction in 50 years:
iocase@lemmy.zip · 6 pts · 20h
The area under the curve above 65 vs the area under the curve below 65 is the issue when combined with all of our institutions and social contracts being designed for endless growth
50% of all new homeless people in the US are above 55 years old which should tell you how this is going to go. It's not going to be like Japan for most western nations. Japan is the best case scenario.
decolo@piefed.social · 6 pts · 1d
best we can do is Ministry of Love
Grandwolf319@sh.itjust.works · 5 pts · 1d
Okay I’m gonna play devil’s advocate, it’s worrying because we are not adapting our system.
I’ve always thought over population is a big issue but when I found out how our social security is intentionally a Ponzi scheme, it made me very worried.
I don’t give two shits about the replacement theory but I’m worried that I am getting paid shit throughout my adult life since labour isn’t expensive yet but
whenif I need to retire, labour could become super expensive.Of course a sane society would just use all the excess wealth today to invest in automation but if we were sane, a lot of things would be better.
mobyduck648@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 22h
Yeah I fully expect not to receive a state pension in the UK, the Ponzi-like economics of it just don’t work for an aging population with a falling birth rate.
The problem is that the government which brings in sustainability measures around this will be electorally annihilated for a generation at least, so the can keeps getting kicked down the road and the likelihood of events forcing a change rather than an orderly change in plenty of time increases.
explodicle@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 1d
Even if AI doesn't reach the highs of science fiction, it will allow one person to do the work of many. Labor prices will probably keep going down for decades.
BrickEater@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 21h
An absolutely disgusting thought.
Eheran@lemmy.world · 2 pts · 8h
Productivity has been going up forever. Why is that disgusting now?
explodicle@sh.itjust.works · 1 pts · 5h
I would imagine because our rents show no sign of decreasing. The rich might decide they don't need all of us.
itsjustachairmary@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 23h
Oh you're finally finding out? Oh noooooo all that fucking around for nothing. Oops.
socsa@piefed.social · 3 pts · 1d
For real, if right wingers are so hell bent on burning the world down, then I'ma make sure the future of humanity isn't my problem.
If things get bad enough I've got three bullets, in case two don't work.
BackgrndNoize@lemmy.world · 3 pts · 22h
oh no declining birth rates, how horrible for the ones who decided not to have kids, and hence don't have anyone to worry about
thorhop@sopuli.xyz · 3 pts · 1d
Alternatively they can assure more children by crashing the economy so hard people will be forced to have like 9 children so that there's a chance that at least 2 of them can take care of their parents when they get old.
That's how Trump decided to make America great again. It's gonna be frontier lynchings, robber barons and slave trades all over again.
Make the US 3rd world again.
Sauvandu60@lemmy.ml · 2 pts · 20h
I would blame declining birth rates to liberalism and capitalism.
UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world · 1 pts · 2h
I'd blame contraception. And by blame I mean celebrate.
But the idea that teenagers aren't fucking because Capitalism really undersells the impact of hormones. Kids fucked under feudalism. They fucked under theocracy. They fucked as serfs and slaves. They fucked as cave people. The mode of production isn't what's at issue.
Birth rates in North Korea are still below replacement level, same as South Korea. Some of the highest birthrates in the world are happening in active war zones. Some of the lowest in the safest and wealthiest.
OhVenus_Baby@lemmy.ml · 2 pts · 1d
I don't think over population is the issue or under. It's the dated, old systems we continue to rely on. I think we have a energy, and transport problem. We are scaling 1800s and 1900s tech. Instead of innovating modern approaches. We have a systems issues.
No_Money_Just_Change@feddit.org · 2 pts · 1d
I got born without any insensitives, and i turned out fine. If kids these days get help with getting born, that is just going to make them weak
Dingo_Kidneys@lemmy.today · 3 pts · 1d
Weak like LITTLE BABY MEN, "whhaaaa, whhhaaaa"
Alpha71@lemmy.world · 0 pts · 1h
Considering humanity is a runaway virus on earth, this is a good thing.