Another great vid: https://youtu.be/RnCCY2YtVX0

And this is compounded by people living much longer...

Oh no not rich people having less money.

Or people just saying "nah"

How do nursing homes do it?

People can also just stop breeding. Seems to be happening in a lot of developed countries. Might be slower but I bet the population will level off eventually. Or plummet dramatically from climate change/right wing political policies.

Poorly is my understanding

God forbid anyone but the state has control over their lives. People being free to choose work is a dictatorship to a dumb ass tankie

I think there's a comic series about that.

Well, I dunno about you, but I'm in no hurry to get children.

Thanos has entered the chat.

war kills people and is sometimes popular

isn't that specifically the government pentions? social security and somewhat less important to those that have personal retirement accounts?

The same people having the same offspring, but later, would lower the population.

So long as people die like regular you can stuff all those dreadful fantasies. Unfortunately, malice is not required for this number to go down.

Also the ratio is a lot higher in nursing homes. Yes you might have a ratio of x nurses to y old people, but you also need to consider the people indirectly contributing. Like the trades people who built the building, or the people who pay for the care through taxes or otherwise, the people working to route electricity, the pharmacists making all those medications that the old people need, etc.

Also, we need people to do jobs other than working in nursing homes. We can't have all our workforce caring for the elderly.

who will work unskilled jobs if there aren't enough people to do them?

Immigrants usually

And it never ever ever goes as planned because the bigots running the eugenics program are myopic twits.

https://yris.yira.org/essays/be-fruitful-and-multiply-the-role-of-israeli-pronatalist-policy-in-the-pursuit-of-jewish-demographic-dominance-in-the-holy-land/

Also the financial ponzi schemes break all at once pissing off old people who vote in mecha-hitler to enslave everyone under 40 so their house prices and pensions stay high.

Even the fears about the economy and government spending are bullshit. Notice the folks obsessing over birthrates always quote the retiree to worker ratio. They don't talk about the dependent to worker ratio, and that's what really matters. Yes, our populations are aging, and yes that means relatively more old people to take care of. But we in turn also have far fewer children to take care of. If we can adapt to the Baby Boom era, we can adapt to an aging population.

Further afield, fears about human extinction are total bullshit. No country is a monolith; every nation has groups within it with higher and lower relative birth rates. If the birth rate stays low and never recovers among the mainstream society, eventually the smaller groups end up composing most of the population, and then the birth rate recovers. The Amish inherit the Earth.

Or, if even that fails, ultimately technology loss alone stabilizes your birthrates. Eventually your population falls so low that you just can't physically manufacture reliable birth control anymore. That's a product of industrial production. It requires a certain minimum population size to run a factory. Below that and we just regress to earlier technological eras. Eventually we end up back in a mostly agrarian state, and suddenly having kids is once again economically beneficial.

I mean, this is a pretty silly response. Is there a hidden population of Martians I'm not aware of, eager to immigrate to Earth to work our low skill jobs?

Hogwash. You forgot the other half of the equation. We don't have as many children to support. Notice how people obsessed over birth rate always focus on the retiree:worker ratio rather than the dependent:worker ratio? The problem disappears once you realize we can simply take money that we were spending on childcare and shift it to eldercare.

Why do you care about the ratio of workers to old people? What matters is the ratio of dependents to workers. We have more retirees, but we also have fewer children. This isn't that hard. If we could manage the Baby Boom of the 50s, we can manage this.

Why the obsession with only retirees? What matters is the dependency ratio.

The dependency ratio counts the total number of dependents, not just the retirees the eugenicists like to focus on. By the end of the century, globally we'll have a dependency ratio similar to the level it was in the mid-20th century.

I’ll acknowledge that saying it’s a dog whistle every time was slightly hyperbolic.

However, I’d argue that the claim that the global human population is declining too rapidly is actually pretty hotly contested. The world's population is still growing — around 8.2 billion now, heading toward a peak near 10.3 billion in the 2080s.

That being said, in some countries there will be a surplus of retirees and not enough workers to fund them through the existing tax structure, which is a legitimate problem. But it's a problem best remedied through better social safety nets, not by popping out more babies.

The biggest contention I have with the concern over population decline is that population decline doesn’t matter at all if we don’t adequately address climate change within the next decade. If someone’s house is actively on fire and they express concern to me that their roof should be re-shingled, I’m not going to give a shit about their roof shingles until I’m certain their roof will survive the fire.

now you know why weve had such a big anti abortion push

Huh? Global population is still growing. (More slowly now, but the slope is still strongly positive.) We haven't hit peak human population yet and won't any time soon. That means if the population of the US declines, we can just import more USians.

Well, the Japan's population is declining and they've been in stagflation for the last 30 years.

We're talking about a global phenomenon here. It's pretty racist to assume that other groups of human beings are somehow fundamentally different from your own. It's pretty xenophobic to believe that the countries with high birth rates will just maintain them forever.

The problem isn't the US running out of workers. The problem is the entire world running out of workers.

They are fundamentally different; the west is looting their country for resources and cheap labor, they will maintain high birthrates so long as neocolonialism prevents them from developing their own means of production.

Put down the socialist theory and look up actual demographic numbers. You're just wrong.

Are you suggesting that birthrates don't remain high in the global south?

You're trying to move the goalposts. We're talking about the future and how birth rates are trending. Now you're trying to change the conversation to the present, "Are you suggesting that birthrates don’t remain high in the global south?" Obviously they're higher in some countries, but those rates are collapsing like they are everywhere else. And there isn't a good match between those countries and what is usually described as the global south.

Since you're too lazy, I did your homework for you:
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1034075/fertility-rate-world-continents-1950-2020/

You can look up more information here:
https://www.birthrate.io/fertility

We're talking about the future need for workers, not the present. So please don't try to move the goalposts by asking the obvious question of are birth rates still higher in the SOME PARTS of the global south relative to the north.

But there's a very clear trend here. Every single country undergoes a decline in birth rates as it industrializes. The global south is not an infinite source of labor you can rely on forever.

You need to let go of this myopic North/South, Imperialist/Colonized framework you seem to be trying to shoehorn into every problem. Here are the countries that have above replacement fertility rates (in green):

There's no real connection here between these countries and "the global south." Counties such as India, most of South America, Iran, SE Asia, etc are all below replacement rates.

Here's what fertility rates are currently projected to look like in 2100:

We're on track to have less than a handful of countries around the world with above-replacement fertility rates. The global south doesn't have elevated fertility rates, the specific regions of Subsaharan Africa and Central Asia do. Even Somalia will barely be above the replacement rate.

You're too lost in a surface-level understanding of "theory" (read: socialist memes) that it's clouding your judgment. Within a generation, countries all over the world, including countries in the global south, will be fighting each other to attract immigrants.

What happens in the rural areas when the need for grocery stores halves, all the walmarts pull out, we have to re-invent logistics. I expect people will either have to go back to making everything themselves, or they'll have to bunch back together around resources.

Easy solution, eliminate the boomers. Crisis averted.

Considering how people struggle with the comparatively small hiccup that is the current Iran-US war, I find it hard to believe that all commenters here would be fine when global trade dwindles.

I however am built different and would simply survive economic and societal collapse.

If society is constantly getting richer every single year and has for decades... Why are people still struggling? Either poor people are unreasonable/irrational, we don't actually care about reducing cost of basic necessities,or the wealth increases are being siphoned out elsewhere.

Population decline would be a non-issue in a functioning economy, because a small shrinkage of the economy would be a non-issue.

I always hate it when someone says that we would need to reduce our standard of living to remain sustainable. It's 100% bullshit predicted on using a definition of "standard of living" that nobody understands (roughly speaking I think it's only used to compare two different persons or groups in an idealized snapshot in time). We waste so much food. Some of it's necessary, but, 40%??

Yeah. But people won't change willingly. A lot of the suburbs around my city are pretty rich areas. I don't expect those people to willingly move to the denser inner city anytime soon. More likely they'll petition city hall to keep their subdivisions running until the city goes bankrupt from the financial burden of supporting a subdivision that does not bring in enough property taxes to support itself

That's an interesting point but I'm not sure if the numbers really add up. As I understand it, the number of dependents will be greater from population decline (primarily due to an aging population) than it was during the baby boom

We should be in a situation where people need to take in like 5 non-relative old people into their homes and provide them constant care (which they cannot do if they are at work). It's not sustainable no matter your economic system.

Society is going to collapse anyway, the question is, how hard and how badly. The whole idea behind "not sustainable" is that it is not possible to sustain something. I personally rather hit the brakes than accelerate before hitting the wall.

Population decline is fine. It’s the population boom driven by World War II panic that was the oddity instead.

In a matter of time, we might return to population levels from the 17th century, and if we do, then so what? A single individual will become all the more valuable, similar to how European nations valued labour more after the Black Death occurred. History likes to repeat itself, even if not necessarily by events like the plague.

Thanks for actually bringing the receipts, that is sadly rare even here.

The future is uncertain and the end is always near. 2100 is a long way to go, if we make it there without a global war, mass death due to land becoming inhabitable with climate change, and good ol' empires violently collapsing, that would be something already.

Many of the countries that experience lower fertility rates are way below what they should realistically carry. India for example, a country with lots of poverty that is already struggling to feed its population after just a little bit of fuel price jumping, has no business being at what, 1.4 billion? Why should we continue to grow even further beyond the limits of a country?

There’s no real connection here between these countries and “the global south.”

Well, there is, if you don't use a binary indicator of above/below replacement rate, and don't just take "south" as geographically south, but rather as "poor, exploited countries, usually (but not always and exclusively) in the south".

Username checks out... I am not particularly happy about many of the things china does, and I don't think "but they are not the US" is an excuse for authoritarianism and imperialism, they got a way better culture of how to deal with old people than the west, both in traditions and in institutions.

What matters even more is total productivity per citizen. It does not matter if a house is built by 20 builders with shovels or 5 builders with excavators. What matters is the house being built. And productivity per worker has massively risen and is, in my opinion, going to rise further.

"Nicer" cities are growing in almost all parts of the world, right? If anything, rural infrastructure will dwindle as people move to the cities for opportunities and amenities.

This is mostly a joke, but I do foresee a time when a very authoritarian government just kills a bunch of old people.

For example, during the One Child Policy the Chinese government did hundreds of thousands of forced abortions.

India for example, a country with lots of poverty that is already struggling to feed its population after just a little bit of fuel price jumping, has no business being at what, 1.4 billion? Why should we continue to grow even further beyond the limits of a country?

India is already below replacement rate.

Well, there is, if you don’t use a binary indicator of above/below replacement rate, and don’t just take “south” as geographically south, but rather as “poor, exploited countries, usually (but not always and exclusively) in the south”.

You're missing the point. This isn't about geography. This is about the actual countries that get labeled as the global south. That includes India, China, Southeast Asia, South America, etc. These are the countries that experienced the worst of colonialism. And they're all heading straight towards population decline, just like the global north.

The whole idea behind “not sustainable” is that it is not possible to sustain something.

-1 That is not "the idea!", that is the definition. A recursive one at that.
-2 That doesn't really follow from either your or OPs comments. What is not sustainable? The economy, society, global trade? Did you delete a sentence?

I think your comment makes more sense if I was arguing for people to counteract population decline. I am not. I was simply pointing out that it won't be sunshine and rainbows as OP and many commenters here seem to believe.

Japan is a whole other mess caused by the exotic monetary policy used to cushion the real estate crash and a risk adverse corporate culture unwilling to properly make use of it, causing investment to stagnate.