One caveat: the rich would rather use violence to force the few people left into menial tasks, than increase wages even a cent.

We just never get to retire.

By 2030 it's projected to be 2.0 workers per retiree.

Seems like it'd be a good place for the last 50 years of gains in efficiency to go.

Time to start taxing the rich instead of worrying about taxing per worker.

Ya know, I have vague memories of reading an argument somewhere that the black plague killed off so many peasants that the surviving ones had materially less shitty conditions for a little while, due to scarcity and all that.

Great news, we're bringing the plague back too!

The people that want higher birth rates don't care about higher wages, the environment, or people's safety.

They just need workers they can milk them until they can't work anymore. They need these workers to spend all their money so they have to keep working.

The actual disease caused by pest bacteria is easily treatable nowadays.

The endgame of capitalism is slavery.

8+ billion people on the planet and people complain about not enough people.

Ponzi schemes aren't sustainable.

The per capita cost of maintaining existing infrastructure does become a problem, but yeah, a solvable one.

Yup, labor scarcity meant higher wages and bargaining power.

Facilitated by such space age concepts as washing your fucking hands and not drinking the corpse-water.

Yeah, there will probably be some growing (er, shrinking) pains, but I'm totally fine if the world just wasn't meant to have 10 billion people on it

Specifically, the peasants had more bargaining power for better conditions because the absolute decrease in their number made each of them more valuable to the ruling class as individuals. There was an increase in peasant revolts and concessions to the peasantry following the black death partly for this reason.

That's "prevention" you're talking about, not "treatment", generally considered better, but still.

what the hell is this WEF UN propaganda? ...Oh wait...the EU talks about depopulating too.

But they stop short of saying what they actually want, which is to cull half of humanity

More like 10 million. Back to the stone age!

The population isn't declining, though. See for yourself: https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/

Edit: Granted, it is in some countries: China, Germany, Italy, Japan, South Korea to name a few.

Yeah, people worried about “population decline” are actually concerned about their preferred race/religion losing political & cultural power.

It’s a dog whistle every time

This is true in places. There are also acounts of places where all the nobility died and the peasants threw weeks long parties.

Communism!!!¡! 😡

There are real challenges to population decline, especially rapid decline like Korea, Taiwan, Ukraine, russia, and China are facing.

The US and Great Britain are not looking at that rapid decline. For us, it's a problem to be managed. Every generation of schoolchildren is 75% the size of the preceeding generation.

That's manageable. No promises that we will do anything to manage it, but it's not crisis level. Other countries will have greater problems. JApan has been doing Allright.

Wages will go up as will competition over labor which will mean less businesses and a shrink in the economy. Do we want to live in a world where small business cant hire anyone?

Scroll down that page a bit and you'll find the "Rate of Growth" chart where you can see a clear decline in birth rate increase globally since the 1960s and it'll only be another decade or so with current trends before we are in genuine negative population growth. And that's also assuming there are no more pandemics and/or global scale ecologocial catastrophes likely to happen in that time (there almost certainly will be).

The right wing family values rural living types seem awfully strange when they are unhappy about the suggestion that we return to 1960s population levels

The slowing down of population growth is real though. Trend of fewer children is across the board not just developed countries. Current trajectory estimates population to peak out in 2050-2080 and then decline, for some in their youth in next 30 or 50 years may not be that too far to completely dismiss.

You must have missed the news. They're making a new stronger plague now :)

I want to live in a world where businesses cannot afford not hiring someone because their name is not "native" enough.

I think it's because we are living longer and the effects of lower birthrate will be shown later

That’s not what the given website says. The given source predicts a continuous growth until at least 2100, while the growth rate slowly grinds to a halt but doesn’t go negative. Obviously this is only one possible forecast, others give different outcomes

Japan has not been doing all right. Their economy has long stagnated, working conditions have been maintained rough with very long working hours and recently they have pivoted on their isolationism bordering on racism to accept workers for outside Japan.

It’s not horrible, but it’s not all right either

Hegemony is the word you're looking for.

Yeah, always a dog whistle.

The early game of capitalism was slavery

2050-2080

Depending on how climate change goes, population might decline by many billions. Hopefully I’ll be dead by then.

Why did it increase in the 90s and stabilize for a decade?

Why would I care about how many people are the same race as me? It could only be a problem if you keep racism.

U mean the one in Russia where one of the researchers recently died?

it's almost like you have your answer already

Build more housing so that houses are more affordable, bring on the 4 day work week.

Expensive houses just funnels more money into the hands of banks and landlords without providing any benefit to society.

What those „retiree per worker“ graphs always fail to mention is how productivity increased over the same period.

Those two workers today produce about as much as 8 did in the 50s so supporting the retirees should in fact be easier today, not harder.

That it isn’t is because wages didn’t increase proportionately.

Midgame pretty much unions, now mostly a speed bump in the rearview mirror.

Perhaps that should change.

When do they teach 'carrying capacity' and what happens after it's exceeded these days?

you all going to say bullshit about retirement, like if fascist around the globe don't want to take it from you already, no amount of canon fodders you spawn for billionaires won't change that

Worry about population decline isn't about wanting more people. It's about wanting there to be enough working-age people to cover the retirement and medical payments of the ones no longer working. We know exactly how many 30-year-olds we'll have in 20 years and it's simply not enough. Something has to give and usually the first to go is the benefits for the people who most need them.

Or maybe the something that has to give is a minority class of people (the .1%) getting a few percent higher tax "burden"

I highly doubt that would be anywhere near enough even if the issue was only limited to the country with the highest number of ultra wealthy people which it isn't.

When the population was predicted to explode into the 21st century, the news said this was a big problem. Now the population is expected to gradually decline. The news is saying this is a big problem.

Who's gonna build that real estate with fewer people around? Where would money for higher salary come from with fewer customers?
Pollution argument is a "carbon footprint" type of bullshit to shift responsibility to general population from companies that actually do most of pollution, and violently defend their right to do so.
Communities become less highly knit because of third spaces dying, phones colonising spare time, and algorithms pushing people to have worse view of world and each other.

Increase population should increase efficiency (economies of scale, many products of intellectual labor being infinitely replicatable) - and efficiency did increase at the same time as population. It's just that salaries didn't.

Mental gymnastic to make worsening conditions of ordinary people somehow fault of other ordinary people.

A falling population with a stagnant economy sounds bad but that's a rising standard of living.

Long hours are not captured in GDP but Japan had that problem long before the population pyramid inverted.

If only I could give a million upclicks to a single comment