It's a dog whistle every time.

Population decline isn't inherently a problem (unless you're a racist worried about "your people" losing power). Too rapid population decline is a big problem. We're already seeing the effects: When the sum of birth rates and working-age immigration fall fast enough, the ratio of working-age people to care-needing people also falls. I don't think I need to explain why it's a problem that every able-bodied working age adult will be responsible (directly or indirectly) for taking care of more people. It puts more pressure on everyone, and impacts societies ability to care for those in need of it.

A controlled, slow, population decline would probably just be a good thing at this point. However, that's not what prognoses are pointing towards, and that's why (non-racist) people are worried.

They are problems for different reasons

Why do you need to build new real estate when there are fewer people to occupy it?

They also want to make sure people with a different skill color do not have more babies than them.

I think that's actually the main reason.

increase wages

Hahahaha oh. That's cute.

If theres a shortage in the labor market, you either fill it with slavery or raise wages.

Americans track record seems to indicate the former waaayyyy before the latter

What News is saying this?

The Onion of course, onionguy!

That can't be true, everything the onion publishes, goes through me first, I would've seen that, trust me, I'm an expert. So who is spreading this?

Sort of depend on perspective, hunger only exists because there's no political will to remove it.

We produce more food globally than we consume, and we can multiply it several times with the same cost of space by swapping more meat for vegan crops.

We have plenty of space for everyone to have shelter, the problem is largely due to the issue that most people want to live in a metropolitan area. So the price for living in a highly sought out location increases to unmanageable levels.

A key factor is the big difference between the kinds of jobs you can get in a more rural location compared to the bigger urban centers. Everyone are forced to move to urban locations to study, causing most people to form their first adult social and professional circles around whichever urban location they studied at.

There's a lot of minor things that needs to be done, what exactly differs by country. But making the rural regions more accessible to live in should be considered across most countries. One simple first step, would be to make remote capable jobs offer their workers to do it all remotely. Government office workers, could quite easily spearhead such an initiative; I bet some people would move closer to nature, if they could hold onto their bread

Is skill coloured by the type of skill or by the level of skill?

Now that would be a really surprising development!

Houses are already kept artificially empty to retain prices. Capitalism always finds a way to screw you over.

Not all news, per se, but I do recall seeing reporting on how a good handful of countries are trying to combat falling birth rates. Like in Far East and Far North countries.

I was gonna say we could start pushing people out on ice floes when they get past 60, but climate change is ruining that for us too.

algorithms pushing people to have worse view of world and each other.

You got a source for your bold claim that humans and the world are good?

usually the first to go is the benefits for the people who most need them.

Then this way of life is not worth saving.

Sounds like everyone shouldn't have kids then so the kids are not forced to go through the burden of caring for douchebags.

Do we want to live in a world where small business cant hire anyone?

Yes. Fuck your tiny dictatorship.

Just because toxic algorithms are making people worse doesn’t mean they’re inherently good, nothing that person said implied that. But also, buddy, you seem kinda depressed, and I’m sorry for that. Most people are basically good most of the time. The vast majority of everyone wants what is best for everyone else, we just have really shitty information about each other.

If you can't afford to tip, you can't afford to eat out. Maybe you should get a second job that pays $2ph

Okay, but retirement is based off there being more people working than not, so in countries with national pensions we'll have to significantly raise taxes, and in countries without such a system, retirees who are invested into index funds, need publicly traded corporations to start underpaying their employees even more (it's really eye-opening when you realize people over 55 own 73% of all the resources of the US, from money to stocks to real estate).

Raising wages fucks the people trying to retire because their stock holdings lose value. It'll have to be slavery if you want to continue having retirement as a thing. Ideally colonialism + slavery, just import slaves from countries still experiencing population growth, such as many African ones...

Wait I think something about this idea might be problematic

Literally the opposite of what's being talked about? The issue is people aren't having enough kids and our economic system is predicated on there being enough people working to support those who don't work (kids, retirees, disabled people). Over the coming decades, we won't have enough people for all the people who need to be supported.

Oh no, not just stagnant GDP. Stagnant/decreasing GDP per capita. The absolute GDP is down even more.

The rich in this case == old people. People over 55 own 73% of the US. Billionaires don't come close to the wealth of boomers. In countries with national pensions they just do it via taxation, in the US it's via retirement funds invested in the companies abusing workers.

People don't seem to get that everything has a cost in human labor to it and if you want people to continue enjoying the benefits of what is actually a pretty good economy all things considered, there need to be enough workers. If there are not enough workers, you can't have retirement anymore. In fact, a few decades from now we'll have to get rid of retirement as a concept unless we want actual slavery.

Booms have market opportunity, and busts have market opportunity.

That said, having too many people to do the work is a lot less dangerous than not enough people to do the work.

The bust comes with a high risk of a total economic collapse. Those houses get cheap, but food, sanitary, and energy security are at risk. Living in a rotting infrastructure is very different than living in an expanding but underdeveloped infrastructure.

Leveling out or a slow population decline would be good in some scenarios. If we're going from 2.5:1 down to 0.25:1, you'll end up with another boomer wave, pissed off at the government, ripe for scenarios that make today's problems seem like an annoying party.

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

Yes, because your wages go to said retirees. Who do you think owns all the companies not increasing your wages?

Good idea, but then let's get rid of the concept of retirement too.

By rarity.

That falls back to "ponzi schemes aren't sustainable"

It's broken.

Look what happened after the plague, 50% of the population was gone.

It broke the back of the Catholic church and feudalism. Peasants got their first pay raise... ever.

I feel like this as well.

Sounds to me like we'll have to do a communism, i.e banding together to help each other out more, to allow people to retire in comfort. The horror!

(Just in case it seems like I'm dismissing anything you said, I'm not, and thank you for your analysis. My main takeaway is that it seems an unavoidable problem)

Both can be a problem

Elon Musk could end world hunger. Full stop. He wouldn’t even notice the dip in his finances. (He offered once, claiming if someone gave him a concrete number, he would pay it, and a nonprofit took him up on it. Surprise, surprise, the whiny little snit backed out.)

They totally could fix the problem. But to those rich shitheads, it’s not a problem. It’s a feature.

People forget how much was going right in the 90s, especially in the states. Boomers were in their prime working years (paying into Social Security instead of collecting it), women’s participation in the workforce had hugely expanded, and a decade of strong economic growth and job creation meant more people working, lower unemployment, and more money going into the system. Obviously some of that was demographic luck, but the Clinton economy was actually putting people to work.

Lower population is generally better for almost all sectors.

But lowering the population means killing people or restricting birthing rights.

Yeah... It's something that has to happen naturally or really slowly to not be eugenicist AF.

Well no. That’s a wildly incorrect take.

Birth rates are already decreasing and are below replacement rate in many places already. Fertility rates are at an all time low. They naturally decrease as income and quality of life increases.

The global fertility rate is 2.2 births per woman. Which is just barely above replacement. In most developed nations, that rate is down in the 1.6 range, well below replacement.

Total Human population is excepted to peak within 50 years and then begun naturally declining, but many countries are already there. China has seen several consecutive years of population decline. India is seeing a leveling off of population growth and will soon decline. The US is increasing solely off of immigration. Japan has a decreasing population. Same with Korea. 8 EU countries have seen population declines over the last 20 years.

If you wanted to see population decline in the US specifically, banning immigration would do it and we’d see a decline in the next census.

This is not about communism vs capitalism, its about the ratios. If there are 5 old people for every young person then how are we supposed to take care of all the old people? There’s just not enough manpower.

The rotting infrastructure problem is made a lot worse by urban sprawl

The problem with calling it a ponzi scheme is that this would apply in all contexts, even in very basic economies without money. If you have a tribe of hunter gathers and suddenly they have a sharp decrease in their birth rate, they too would have a hard time taking care of their elderly/children.

We don't need a "bigger" economy. We probably need a "smaller" economy. It needs to be redesigned and rebuilt, so that the people who do the work are the ones that reap the benefits.

Immigration!

Oh...

Population is already lowering in developed nations

Population decline is a global phenomenon. You can't offset this loss with immigration when the countries people are coming from are also experiencing a population decline. We (in the West) are currently using immigration to offset this loss now, but when the population decline really starts hitting other parts of the globe (as it is projected to do within the next few decades) then that will no longer be a solution.

Peasants only got the ability to leave the land they were bound to to seek better employment elsewhere after the black plague.

Actually it is a communism vs capitalism thing. The problem arises in both, but the solutions available depend on the system. I reccomend you look up how China is handling its massive elderly population. For example the elderly there have huge public parks and get outside moving and socializing a lot. In big cities it's common for them to have mid day slow dance meetings in the parks. This is only possible because the government's priority is not producing profit for billionaires but caring for its people. So it maintains these things and the public transport required to get the elderly there, and the assistance to keep them fed and healthy.

This video is 15 years old: https://youtu.be/SvmV7GRRPq0

When people stay active and a part of their community into their old age instead of sitting in their huge houses alone or in a nursing home they require much less support to keep living.

No, it's about the scale of society and how we support ourselves in retirement, though. See, if retirement funds rely on, as the guy above me says 1. Companies underpaying their employees and 2. Governments taxing a group of more people in the below generations than there are to support in the top - then those are unsustainable sources of retirement comfort.

So what would be sustainable? Well historically, and in some countries today, old people need family to support them into old age. You would need either your own kid, with their own house big enough for you, or a rich little nephew with a house big enough for all you and your siblings to live in while retired.

Or... We just do the decent thing and take care of non-relatives. To ease the load on, say, retirement homes, we'd need to agree across society to bring the old people into communities of younger adults, and those younger adults would need to check on them regularly.

Sice this requires a community binding together, you might call it "communism." Though it isn't necessarily Marxism.