If you wanted the younger generation to continue producing workers for the capitalist machine, you should have made sure that potential parents had enough resources to actually maintain a family if they started one.
But yeah, that would have slightly reduced quarterly profits, and we can’t have that kind of long-sightedness messing with the short-term returns of our shareholders.
I’ve been told it’s going to trickle down any moment now… </s>
Population growth is a pyramid scheme.
I’d never actually thought of it that way but, holy shit, that’s pretty damned close!
Capitalism is a pyramid scheme.
FTFY
You can always move to North Korea if you don’t like capitalism that much.
Why do we have to go to the extreme. The scandanavian countries are socialist/capitalist countries and they have one of the best living conditions.
This is like if a guy starving in the desert complained he wants water and you offered to toss him into the middle of the ocean.
lmao, stay mad nerd
If only there were people in this world who would want to come to our country . Heck, we could set up a system where employers can post jobs that they have trouble filling and we could match up people outside country who can fill that need. Then, if those people turn out to be decent and moral, we can let them stay in the country permanently.
It is too bad that everyone outside of the country is a foreigner who wants to steal jobs.
Immigrants help out in the short term, but then they and their children realize the same thing that people who already live here do: that wages are too low, and that rent and cost of living is too high to support children.
Plus, corporations can use those immigrants to bust unions and keep wages down and rent prices up. Supply and demand, because we live in an oligrarchic dystopia that doesn’t have enough social safety nets to make sure that new workers coming in don’t sabotage the ones currently working.
I’m the children of immigrants and hang around with the children of other immigrants, and we’re not having children ourselves, or ware waiting until increasingly later ages (minimum 30) because of how expensive it is to live, even without children. It only takes 1 generation to realize that new immigrants will just get stuck in the same rut that non-immigrants are already in.
Adding more people just increases the power of corporations (the real government) to treat workers as disposable objects. It’s probably why corporate run governments don’t try to stabilize unstable regions, but rather prefer to exploit them until there’s a mass migration. More people to use for dangerous labor = more expendables that no one can afford to care about.
The very same reason NATO destroyed Libya’s infrastructure including water pipelines and plunged all their inhabitants back to the dark ages back in 2011, and now NATO countries are complaining they are getting full of immigrants. Maybe if they hadn’t commited war crimes there they would have stayed there.
Satire? I can’t tell.
I would have suggested eating babies , but it would be counterproductive.
Pretty sure, but you never can tell anymore.
Then you’re just committing them to taking low paying jobs. Don’t you see what is going on? This is what happened after the black plague that ended feudalism. We need to stick to our guns and make them increase wages. Your argument to have immigration solve the baby crisis is EXACTLY what business owners want. They WANT to keep wages low with an infinite influx of people from poor countries because these immigrants won’t know they are getting fucked in the ass with low pay.
Immigrants deserve a living wage too.
I mean immigration exists in every western country, I dunno what you’re complaining about.
“if those people turn out to be decent and moral”
Who decides? Yikes.
Rephrase it to: fit for our justice system
‘Not a rapist, tax cheat, or murderer’ seems like a pretty low bar that most could manage to get over.
Which is itself fine, until you take into account the long and ongoing history of the way that immigrants, marginalized demographics, and particularly immigrants from marginalized groups are treated by our justice system, whether or not they’ve actually committed a serious crime or any crime at all.
I’ve started rolling my eyes at “Who decides?” prompts. Whether it’s judging people, interpreting laws, etc.
PEOPLE. People process your grocery purchase at checkout, and verify you found everything okay. People determine whether the charge of murder is substantially proven and justified. People evaluate a person’s immigration application.
This is not a brand new science. Fallible, sure. Imperfect, sure. Useless, absolutely not.
Thank you for responding. My “who decides” comment was an unuseful shortand for what I wanted to express, which is that I don’t have much trust in our institutions to carry out the will of the people.
Shit, until the west falls, I’m staying rubber’d up and preferably, in the guts of other men rather than doing some shit that can accidentally saddle me with an 18-year money sink in a country that already wants my every last dollar; since that whole ‘reversible vasectomy’ thing sounds both too good to be true, and outside of my current capability for expenditure.
You have a way with words my occasional butt cowboy.
Occasional Butt Cowboy
You should post this to !bandnames@lemmy.world
Aaaaaand subbed.
18 years if you’re lucky.
18 years feels like an outdated number. I know very few people around that age who are financially secure enough to move out, often even with roommates.
Exactly.
They’ll kick you and they’ll beat you and they’ll tell you it’s fair…
Nah, they’ll tell you it’s either your own or the migrants fault.
Looking at the way things have been going for years (decades) now, giving someone a birth would be a huge disservice - they’ll inherit a simultaneously more globalized and divided world, a world with technology that has the potential to trivialize sharing knowledge and experience, which is instead use to drive up engagement for the sake of profits, effectively breeding hate groups and echo chambers, a world with economy consisting of bubbles and not-so-careful manipulations, leaving our offspring in a position few would probably envy. Oh, and there’s rapid climate change that is being ignored and actively accelerated by the people and other entities that are capable of doing anything about it.
I know more than a few people who have never considered any of the above, and I’m sure many people here know such people as well, so it’s more than safe to say that whatever the humanity is facing in the near future, it’s nothing similar to extinction through lack of birth.
The future seems really good for certain groups of people, but I doubt my kids could be a part of these groups, or even want to a part of these groups. Not that I would actively indoctrinate them, but I’d imagine that living with me through the years when they’re developing and shaping themselves is going to leave its mark regardless.
Maybe I’ll regret that decision when it’s already too late, of course, but then again, this is not going to be a world-ending decision by no merit.
the vast majority of people who decide to be child-free don’t regret the choice later in life. https://msutoday.msu.edu/news/2023/childfree-study-confirmed-April2023
That, and the planet cannot sustain our population with our current systems. Why have a kid when you know their future is doomed?
I forget where I heard this stat, but the Earth could support 12 billion people if resources were distributed equitably. But, alas, :gestures broadly:
Removed by mod
That’s the funny thing to me about this. There’s a direct contradiction between the needs of capitalism and the needs of the planet. Infinite growth, overpopulation, it’s all grand for $$$
The economy requires growth, but the actual planet requires less people. The only sustainable countries on earth right now are places like Japan, where the economy is crumbling due to the aging population.
Really makes it clear that our artificial systems aren’t in sync with our actual needs.
The part I don’t understand is why it’s important to hit the “replacement level”. Wouldn’t it be better for the planet if there were fewer people living on it and competing for resources?
but then the megacorporations can’t hit their iNfInItE gRoWtH and we can’t keep making the billionaires richer.
Consider the number of financial instruments that are essentially pyramid schemes built on the assumption of perpetual growth.
Its all of them
It would be, but the economy was built on perpetual growth schemes.
Don’t forget, the economy is here to be served by us, not the other way around!The economy will crumble if we don’t get to replacement levels at least, but it will also crumble, along with everything else if we do. Only way out of this is to change the whole model before it crumbles. But that would mean the rich need to get (willingly) less rich, so I’m not holding out hope…
If there’s less people than jobs it’s easier to ask for better wages.
The Ponzi scheme, that is American “social security” (I mean actual social security, but all the rest of the social services too), would collapse if there arent more poor people pumping money into, than are taking out of it. Instead of doing shit like taxing the fuck out of the rich, or AI/robots.
But, yes, it would solve A LOT of the worlds problems if there were less people.
To be fair, I don’t think taxing robots will get you far…
How do you figure. If the workforce becomes by and large robotic, taxing the businesses, based on that, like you would humans, would work well enough. If not, then there needs to be some concession from businesses to pay the same or more as when humans were doing the jobs.
I’m moreso being cheeky about your wording - robots don’t own cash, thus can’t pay taxes. You must tax businesses.
Fair enough. Lol. I meant the business that own the robots.
Yes, but our whole economy, and maybe even society itself is built on the requirement and assumption of growth.
We steal tomorrow to pay for today.
If we stop having enough people to grow, we will collapse under the requirements of our system until a new non-growth economy/society is formed from the ashes.
I don’t think it will be possible to have a smooth transition to a non-growth or low-growth society since very few people will willingly sacrifice the amenities we pay with in debt, which is paid for by predicted growth.
When that predicted growth goes negative, collectively, we will not be able to afford the things we want, and that will cause mass chaos and potentially even resource wars.
Not for capitalism. A lot of our systems were built on the concept of infinite growth.
Actually, you’re right, and I think that lowered populations are a good thing. World needs quality people, not just quantity. A world filled with a smaller amount of environmentally conscious and responsible people is better than a world filled with a large amount of meat eating, gas guzzler driving jackasses that spend all their time being racist, while overconsuming everything and yelling and shooting at anyone who even suggests that maybe they should cut down on consumption.
Show us where there are conditions that would encourage people to start a family.
Hoooooo boyyyy, just wait until the next few generations are up to bat for breeding more worker bees. Population’s gonna plummet :)
Given the ability to automate production, its not really a bad thing for the population to decrease. Of course the process of decreasing and the sociatal adjustments are going to be… difficult.
Replacement level shouldn’t be a goal when the population increases every year. At the very least house prices should be neutral or decreasing relative to wages, if you want more people than you’re already getting.
The people linking kids to capitalism im dead bruh 💀
where is $1500 rent?
Right?
Med rent for Chicago area is $1800.
Omg that’s crazy. How does anyone afford to live there?
“Accused”, by who, YPulse? Why the fuck would I care about some shitpost article from a dumpster site?
Millennials and Gen-Z are truly the lost generation.
Imagine still living with parents in your late twenties or even early thirties because you simply cannot afford to even rent your own place. Now imagine that work pays like shit and you are busting your ass working long hours to chase an eternal pipe dream of economic prosperity. You can’t even seek psychiatric help for your ailing mental health because it’s expensive, inaccessible and oversubscribed.
For a man, being in that situation makes you downright undateable so it’s not like you can rely on the joint incomes that couples do either.
And we wonder why toxic masculinity is on the rise…
The rich have done a smash & grab on the economy and made everybody poorer as a result of their own greed. It’s a dangerous game.
