There is enough out there for everyone to live a happy life. We just have to realize it.
We know, realizing it isn’t the issue, it’s (oversimplified) the greed of the ones who stand in the way of making it happen.
Humans are the most overabundant resource on the planet…if capitalism actually functioned, the system wouldn’t incentivize creating more.
But the current economic system isn’t even true capitalism…it’s optimized wage enslavement paired with a caste system. Keeping labor pools well stocked depresses the value of replacing individual units…all they’re figuring out now is how best to trim maintenance costs.
It’s a crisis for who will support you in your old age. Capitalism or no capitalism, if you want to keep eating after you stop working, either you store enough literal food in your barn, or somebody else works so you eat.
Traditionally, that’s family: your children. Capital/investments/savings, or socialised care, spreads that around the State a bit more (or round the local or global community). But when there are few children and many adults, later there are few working people and many retirees wanting to enjoy life - and you’re one of the retirees.
It’s a “problem for capitalism” because so many people have invested in capitalism for their retirement, and that could be upended. And because actually-small investments were made, on the basis that constant economic growth means lots will be returned when the time comes.
But it’s a “problem for humanity” - all the people who don’t have children to care for them and rely on money and financial investments - which both just represent a stake in someone else’s work - for the future.
I’ve written myself into a corner a bit here. Few working adults to many retirees is always going to be difficult, no matter your economic/political system. But logically from my, simplified, argument, the last two paragraphs beckon a third. To recap,
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Retirement funds: a stake in “Capitalism”, to provide for your retirement based on broad economic growth
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Money: a stake in the total economy, to provide from people’s work. Then:
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A stake in the community, based on being a member of the community. E.g. a citizen - then this is socialism. If there are enough working adults - or bread in the barn - to provide for all the elderly, then all the elderly (you included) are provided for, regardless of whether they have children or saved money or made investments.
But still, if there isn’t enough for everyone, everyone suffers. And it’s rare to find a community that really wants to care for its elders well, putting in the effort for them rather than people spending on themselves, without outsourcing to ‘capitalism’ and economic growth.
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In so many of the contrarian responses I’m seeing, I’m reminded of Fisher:
it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.
That is to say that so many cannot escape the capitalist framework of productive workers supporting the elderly. As though that’s the only way society can possibly be organized.
Retirees are not seen as deserving of their reward, but rather a drain on productive labor. It’s no wonder that there is so little sympathy for the destitute and homeless when those who’ve “earned” their leisure are still known as parasites.
How do you imagine a world of caring for those who cannot care for themselves without people to care for them?
We’re talking about population decline, not disappearance.
All they say is that decline is only a problem in capitalism
In a socialist utopia that means a larger burden for the population to share which leads to further population decline
They never mentioned how they would remedy that and neither did you
Captialism can cause low birth rate, but no economic system can survive the decimation of the prime-aged working class.
Even china’s seeing low birth rates, but they have a bit more padding.
Capitalism is fine with it actually.
The issue is that there will be too many old people and not enough young people to support them.
But old people have most of the money. So, lots of money will still be spent. Capitalism will be fine. Sure, some old people will have no money and bankrupt their children. But capitalism does not care about that.
It would have been a bigger problem before AI and robotics. But capitalism will shrink the workforce faster than birth rates.
So phuck but use a condom.
Lots of gay sex. Lots and lots. Daylight’s burning folks.
I’m proud to do my part. 🏳️🌈🫡
Not the folks who live in Forks. It’s always cloudy there.
But remember the lube… Free lube CMC a cake ingredient. It makes a huge amount of clear gel when mixed with water. Like a spoon of it will Make a cup of gel.
Capitalism can exist on a gold standard, or a barter system of goods, which if we were on those systems then a shrinking population would do nothing inherently negative.
The thing that breaks with a declining birth rate is monetary policy, which requires an ever growing money supply because we’ve designed a 2% inflation target, which means growing consumption via debt monetization. The reason for 2% inflation is to monetize our debt, in order to force people onto the risk curve for economic growth; we grow the money supply about 6% a year to achieve 2% inflation due to technological advances and a broken CPI index.
Sounds catchy, but I’m not sure this is really true. Capitalism is about owning things, not selling things.
And even more specifically, hyper consumerism-driven, wasteful capitalism more than just capitalism itself.
Well regulated and not utterly greed-driven capitalism that gets fairly taxed to support the societies infrastructure that it feeds off is not so bad. If that would ever happen.
If that would ever happen.
Well, you see, the thing about capitalism is it empowers exactly the people who don’t want that to happen. Consumerism-driven, wasteful capitalism is the in-built trend of capitalism itself, not an unfortunate variant - even government regulation doesn’t solve these problems.
I don’t think “not so bad” is the best phrase for that. Not as bad, certainly, but I have a difficult time saying “not so bad” about any kind of capitalism that isn’t already transforming into something like market socialism.
Well yes but no. Supporting this many old people is a genuine problem, no matter the economic system.
Sure, a problem in the sense that it requires a solution. Capitalisms solution is infinite population growth via forced pregnancy. A non capitalist option is to simply use the very large amount of resources available to take care of the old folks. It’s not profitable, but that’s not the point.
A non capitalist option is to simply use the very large amount of resources available to take care of the old folks. It’s not profitable, but that’s not the point.
Oh, the capitalists have very much figured out how to cash in on old folks. It’s incredibly lucrative. I can’t imagine them abandoning that gravy train until they’ve siphoned off all that filthy lucre that’s settled out in the aging class.
The clone army is right around the corner. Boy that’s gonna be spicy.
You can’t just borrow or create money to fund things that are not profitable. Not saying infinite population growth is desirable but spending the large amount of resources on old folk does mean not spending it on the young folk = less money to education, health care and infrastructure. It’s not fair to reduce real world problems to ‘you just need to spend your money wiser’
You can’t just borrow or create money to fund things that are not profitable.
BWAHAHA
That’s a good one!
You absolutely can borrow billions of dollars to fund things that have no clear path towards profitability. It’s called Silicon Valley VC. If you’re a member of the aristocracy, it’s easy to borrow money for things that aren’t profitable.
Hear me out. Maybe we consider the resources available directly rather than the made up paper system we have to abstract the concept of wealth. Aka, fuck money
the concept of currency is absolutely not the problem… barter systems are hugely complex and incredibly inefficient
currency is (should be) an abstraction of the value of something… to support the population as big as we have we need a system that’s able to manage that complexity
currency unlocks immense amounts of human effort and allow people to do what they want instead of just the things that are wanted in their local area. you can’t really have grants with a barter system, complex supply chains are impossible (so say goodbye to advanced scientific research and most modern technology), large scale planning is over because you can’t guarantee whether you can get the resources you need for the things that you’re able to trade in months or years time (just because your iron supplier wants toilet paper now doesn’t mean he will want it 2 years into the future when you need more iron)
it’s also a multiplier, on top of just reducing work required for every single trade. to do a lot of those large-scale things there will always be cash laying around somewhere - you get given it, and then you need to plan or get it from multiple sources until you have enough to request the resources you need… whenever currency is laying around like this, it’s wasted effort. currency works; currency gets things done when it’s moving; currency sitting around is wasted… when you put that currency in a bank, they’re able to loan it to others, who then put it to good use by being productive. you get that currency back when you’re ready, and all of a sudden there is more done that what would have otherwise been able to be done: that’s what the “made up paper system” allows (and there are many more examples of this)
it could be arguable that there’s plenty to go around and that if everyone is happy living with equality and not extravagance then we wouldn’t need to barter or trade anything… perhaps that’s true person to person (ignoring human behaviour, sociopaths, power over people in and of itself becoming the currency, doing the work that nobody wants to do - some of that can probably be tamed with societal norms and punishment, and technology) but humanity’s understanding of the universe needs to progress to improve everything for everyone, and the more we progress the more complex and large-scale the needs of the projects are that are required to do them… if you have a bundle of resources, how do you allocate them to projects without knowing how much of a dent they’ll make? how do you say which will take more to complete: ITER or the LHC? it’s already impossible for us to comprehend everything about our system of trade without removing the abstraction that simplifies it all so we can reason about it
don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of tweaks to be made to make sure currency again becomes representative of value, but currency in and of itself absolutely makes people’s lives better every single day. unrestrained capitalism is absolutely the problem with currency - currency is just its tool of choice
Mate, it’s not a zero sum game. You can do both.
Can’t you See, that when you have a smaller percentage in young folk, you can improve the quality of living (of education, If health Car, infrastructure) for them and the old Folks? As Thread Opener Said, it would Not be profitable, but it don’t have to be in a post-capitalism World. Its sufficient enough for it to become a Zero sum Game, where expenses are the Same as the realized gains. And once the Population has been reduced to a sustainable amount, we as humanity could start over again, then growing in a sustainable way ( and hopefully Out of this planets restrictions). But oh Well, in Out current track record, this all will be nill, AS capitalism will have Destroyed our fixed Environment - earth - by then.
It’s really not a problem though. Half of the work done in society is completely pointless.
Anyone who has worked in a corporate office job can tell you just how much pointless overhead there is in big companies. Improvements in technology haven’t resulted in a decrease in working hours, the standard of work has just been pointlessly increased to consume the same amount of labor hours. Look at computers and their introduction to the office. Things that would have been handled by a single page memo in 1970 are now handled by a 50 page report with glossy images and endless charts and graphics.
The key thing to realize is that companies are not rational. Their behavior is not driven by hard-edged perfectly rational profit and loss decisions. They’re run by people, and people are social animals. And the people running the major companies are a fairly tight knit social group. They all talk with each other, they’re all friends and intermarry with each other’s families. They chase the same fads. Why do you think useless AI models have taken off so much? Historical aristocracies regularly became obsessed with fads. Our aristocracy is currently obsessed with LLMs.
This matters because this aristocratic group-think guides the actions of companies. Companies could have used computer technology to dramatically slash their labor costs. But that was unfashionable among the ownership class. Instead, it became fashionable to simply have the workers use those tools to create more elaborate reports and documentation. It’s the modern office equivalent of a medieval lord pouring resources into a gilded palace and an elaborate retinue of performers. Executives get prestige from having highly paid people create pointless busy work, so that’s what they do.
This pattern can be seen across many fields. Labor-saving devices haven’t been used to reduce total human hours worked, they instead are used to expand the quantity of work done, usually pointlessly. Companies are not rational, and they do not make rational labor decisions.
This is why I am not in the slightest worried about an aging population. You state that too many old people is a genuine problem, no matter the economic system. But that is demonstrably FALSE! Too many old people is not a problem for a society that already employs the majority of its workforce in pointless bullshit jobs. The majority of our labor is pure performative waste; it exists primarily to stroke the egos of the aristocracy. We could cut the total hours worked in half without any decrease in the actual quality of goods and services available for people to enjoy.
Over the last several decades, companies have been able to get by while being incredibly lazy and inefficient. They’ve had the luxury of keeping excess headcount. Yes, it costs money, but prestige is more important than profit once you reach a certain level of wealth. As long as labor has been cheap, the owner class can afford to employ people in largely performative roles.
But with an aging population? The value of labor will skyrocket. Companies will find that they can’t employ scores of people to fill pointless bullshit jobs. Companies that refuse to adapt will simply go bankrupt and be replaced by rationally-run operations.
How are we going to take care of a rapidly greying population? Simple. We’ll just stop wasting most of our labor.
Alternatively: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ättestupa
I find this rhetorical framing unfair and even disingenuous as it suggests, absent clarification, that this is a universal scenario created by any system rather than a scenario that is only common under hierarchical systems that demand continual population growth, like capitalism.
You’d have been better to say “Any system would face problems if suddenly burdened by the consequences of capitalism.”
So wouldn’t adding more make it worse?
Infinite growth! Infinite population growth to feed the machine! More babies!
In the long term, yes. Ideally your birth rate matches your death rate so you have stability in supporting the citizenry. But when your system expects the birth rate to exceed the death rate, even changing to equilibrium can be catastrophic.
Is it even a crisis for capitalism? Modern day capitalism seeks to eliminate workers, the ideal for the capitalist is to make a factory full of robots with like 10 employees that manage and service them. As factory work dies the population stabilizes (it doesn’t shrink, it just stops going up year over year) and the remaining population performs service jobs that can’t be performed by AI/Robots or a select bit of high paying factory jobs where robots cannot yet perform the factory task.
In an even more dystopian outlook the capitalists don’t even want people for service, they likely would want robot and AI service (waiters, barbers, etc) in the long game to eliminate the need for serfs.
At the end of the day the cry about population collapse and declining birthrates only makes sense when you add a desired ethnicity before the term. Example [White] birth rates or [White] population collapse. Elon Musk isn’t worried about the birth rate of Japanese or South Koreans. This whole thing is about racist views on world ethnicity.
Every person born is another potential consumer for [PRODUCT]
Yeah, but it’s cyclical. You need people to buy product, but people need money to buy product. Yeah, the ultra wealthy will have money, but you can get more money from 10 million people buying something for $10 than from 10 people buying something for $100,000.
If you get rid of the jobs then people don’t have money so who will buy [PRODUCT]?
You could have 10 trillion people on the earth, but if you only have 3 billion jobs the issue isn’t population. You could argue that 3 billion jobs support up to 15 billion people, but the issue still isn’t the population at that point, it’s the number of jobs.
the last paragraph is were capitalism fails, and where socialism works. 3 billion jobs can support 15 billion people, but that would mean giving the fruits of that labor to those people who have no jobs. This is distributing the product of the labor force to everyone, so everyone can live, that is socialism. If you say ok, let’s just have 3 billion people, one per job, then you aren’t producing for 15 billion, and now the job pool will shrink accordingly.
So, if/when machines come to a point where one, basic, job creates enough GDP to support a massive amount of people, then you need the populace to own the means of that production.
In my own statement, when I said that 3 billion jobs could maybe support 15 billion people, I said that from the capitalist mindset. What I meant when I said that was that one high income person could have up to 4 other people that actively has access to their income to utilize. This could be one person with a spouse and 3 kids or it could be a person with 2 sets of grandparents and great grand parents. As an example this would scale with number of persons with income. IE you could have a couple with 3 kids or 1 adult and 4 grand parents. The specifics don’t need to be specific, I was just trying to provide an extreme example of how far one income could go for the total world capitalist expenditure.
EDIT: To make it abundantly clear, my example was to express the extreme bounds of people with access to an income. That might be a kid on the Jersey shore with a credit card or a grand parent whom the income bringer is taking care of. Either way, there is a limited number of people that one income is actively taking care of and have access to that income. My original example was 3 billion persons with income and 15 billion persons spending the money. I think most adults can find 4 other people who spend money on their behalf by the age of 40.
With the introduction of automation every decade (currently AI is the big one), unemployment rates will go up so we don’t even need as many working. Our capitalist brains just can’t fathom “handing out” extra resources.
Every automation brought more work, rather than less. Why? Because profit. If the boss owner can get more out of less people, they will fire the unneeded workers, bring prices down and force the competition to either follow or close down
That’s not exactly true though. With excess, we’ve increased the needs and wants of individuals and scaled production to match. We could easily provide the same amount as before with less people, but every generation is leveraging the growth of the previous generation. Once we don’t grow in one generation, we’ll plateau and we won’t be ready for it. It’ll be the social version of an economic recession.
It’s more work because the company continues to operate like before and just piles more into it instead of looking at the overall work and removing things that aren’t necessary, and reorganizing operations/back office.
I’d call that pile on of more work productivity. If you can get 20 blankets a day with automation instead of 20 a month without, and they’re of similar quality, then why wouldn’t you?
Now you put automation in front of a good coder and all the sudden that video game that used to take 5 years to make, only takes a year. Again, all good if you can approach similar quality.
Back 500 years ago, only the wealthiest could afford a fine blanket and it would take ages to produce. Nowadays anyone can purchase one at their preferred store. Automation has increased productivity and thus democratized purchasing power.
There are still billions on this planet that struggle to survive. Billions we could potentially pull out of poverty. Why stop the automation train now when the tracks show that we have further to go?
It’s a problem that there will be fewer people in the generation below ours to support our generation in our dotage. This problem is the same regardless of your economic model. Fewer people in the working pool and more people sick and elderly is a bad time.
The majority of the hours worked in the US economy are pure pointless waste. The waste rate is so high because labor is cheap. With more expensive labor, companies will have to use it more responsibly.
If you think companies use labor efficiently, you have clearly never worked in a big corporate office.
Solving the labor crisis of aging is trivially simple. The market will simply force companies to be more efficient with labor. And as labor earns higher wages, workers will pay higher payroll taxes and be able to keep the pension system running.
That’s the great part the current youth won’t get to be sick and elderly. We’ll just be sick and dead.
There’s currently 5 million care workers in the US, at a total population of 332 million. Source
That means that even if the birth rates drop really low and we only have 50 million workers in the next generation, it will still be enough to care for the elderly.
However, it might not be enough to fill the last bullshit workplace some company makes up to make yet another dollar into the pockets of the rich.
Old people, even those who rely on care workers directly, also rely on a lot of other types of workers. They need to eat, so some portion of the farmers, agricultural processors, logistics workers, cooks, dishwashers, etc. will need to continue to support the industries that feed people. Then the industries that feed people also rely on their own supply chains: equipment manufacturers and maintainers, electricity and energy, etc.
Simply being alive relies on the work of others. Broadly speaking, we expect there to be a ratio of workers to the broader population, including those who are not working: children, students, disabled, elderly retirees, etc. If the workers stop working, the non-workers won’t be able to live.
If there’s a one-person society, they basically will always need to work at least some to stay alive. If they’re incapacitated from age or injury, that might mean death, no matter how much they’ve accumulated up to that point.
So no, I don’t think this is a uniquely capitalist problem. Non-capitalist societies have dealt with population collapse before, but those tend to impose real danger to the non-working elderly, and not all of them survive the turmoil.
And what causes fewer younger people?
Couples not having children.
What causes couples not to have children?
Well, beyond simply not wanting them: economic insecurity. A more equitable economic system would remove that barrier.
People understand the concept of, “no infinite growth on a finite planet,” but then refuse to accept that that holds true for us as well. The world population has more than doubled in my lifetime. Obviously we can’t do that forever. Especially in the context of a climate crisis that is making less land livable over time. For completely practical reasons we are going to have to set up some kind of system that can function in equilibrium rather than requiring growth.
function in equilibrium rather than requiring growth.
Not only that, a system that can adapt to changes where the equilibrium might shift over time. We have a lot of work to do to undo the climate crisis, if we even can, and if not, we’ll be living in a geologically different planet when we do.
This is true but people focus so hard on the population they miss the wider issue. Its not the number of people thats the issue right now, its the massively uneccesary amount of resources each person uses.
The world can accomodate a lot of people IF we shift the way we do things. If we all live like the world is an endless piggy bank, it wont work.
Without considering the way we live and the system we’ve built, people begin sliding into borderline eco-fascist ideas of population control because its an easy thing to understand and latch onto. But the situation is much more complicated than that.
So yes, there is a finite human population limit but that doesnt mean we’ve hit it or are even going to hit it.
Its not the number of people thats the issue right now, its the massively uneccesary amount of resources each person uses.
so your proposal is to increase the population count, but decrease how much each person has available as resources? Essentially just throwing a lot of people into poverty?
It’s not about decreasing how much each person has - quite the opposite, actually. It’s about increasing the efficiency of how we distribute our resources so that more gets to those who need it because we already have far more than we need but most of it is wasted or artificially made scarce to increase profit.
The US throws away something like 60% of the food we produce annually while kids starve and politicians talk about getting rid of free lunches at schools.
The “overpopulation” fear is really just misdirection from the greedy few to keep the rest of us from questioning why we let them get away with everything.
but decrease how much each person has available as resources? Essentially just throwing a lot of people into poverty?
That is not implied. Especially if we consider that the resources we waste are through supply chains rather than our own direct use. If my electrical supply comes from from a more efficient source, then my usage can be less wasteful and potentially cheaper. If my city continues to improve public transport, I can actually save money and use less resources in daily transit. Products we consume have serious potential to conserve resources at a mass scale, and often it even saves them money due to paying less for resources needed in production. A lot of waste also comes from overproduction, think of those Dunkin’ Donuts end-of-day-disposal videos. We make far more than we need in so many areas.
Furthermore, the most wasteful people are a minority of the mega-rich. You and I probably don’t need to cut down much on jet fuel costs. People close to poverty usually aren’t (directly) wasteful, hell, some of them actually reduce waste through dumpster-diving and recycling schemes.
No. And you either know that and are strawmanning or are brainwashed into thinking excessive resource use equates to wellbeing.
well if you think excessive resource use has nothing to do with wellbeing, i’d happily take your excessive resources from you :)
Ok so you have no counter argument. Got it.
There is a MASSIVE middle ground between overconsumption and excess consumerism, and actual poverty.
Pretending that any amount of scaling back consumption inevitably leads to mass poverty is intellectually dishonest, or just genuinely stupid.
Which are you?
hey man, why would you respond inflammatorily like this? can’t we just discuss things in good faith?
maybe i’m a bit heated about this topic, but that is solely because i think it’s really important for humanity’s wellbeing that the statement that “we need more people” doesn’t prevail. But i recognize i can’t explain that to you’all properly.
Nobody said ‘we need more people’. Your failure to comprehend an argument is not our responsibility.
if you get heated you should take a break, come back later, and re-read the thing you’re responding to. otherwise you may misinterpret people’s intent. your response doesn’t match what they said.
