The solution is obviously to take away womens’ reproductive rights. Duh.
It is a basic math problem… they keep raising housing prices ain’t nobody going to have kids when 1500 in rent is due monthly
$1500 a month? I wish!
How is your rent so cheap?
I haven’t rented in years, luckily I found something that wasn’t dumb expensive and I’ve slowly been fixing it up
HEY WORLD LEADERS: make the world a less shitty place, so I don’t feel guilty about bringing a child into it, and I’ll rawdog more often. Do we have a deal?
Sorry, the best I can do…
Does anybody think about the fact that every year on average 9-10 million people die every year from starvation and malnutrition related deaths. The vast majority of these numbers are children under 5 years old. The 9-10 million number was pre-covid. There was an uptick due to the supply chain issues. I think I read an article saying the number for 2021 was around 14 million. Again, mostly children.
It’s mostly kids in 3rd world Africa, middle east, India, etc.
We over here need to have more kids though. Because profits.
Idk I just think all this is dumb. Fuck capitalism and the system we have. It’s all fucked.
How is this a fertility issue? Are people unable to have children, or just unwilling?
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It’s the other way around. Fecundity is the measure of how well a person is biologically able to reproduce. Fertility is how many children people actually have, which also depends on voluntary choices.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/9781118896877.wbiehs153
Sperm motility issue rates are rising worldwide and I found out I was one of them this year. Mid 30s, waited to start a family while we went further in our careers. Now that we’re ready, we got hit with this, fuck me for being responsible I guess.
But you ARE being responsible. The responsible thing to do is not have kids.
why would this be the case?
Are we sure the increasing sperm motility rate isn’t because they are trying to get out of this country?
I think the consensus is that it’s mostly as a result of women having greater reproductive choices, greater access to family planning services, and more women choosing to delay having children or choosing to not have children at all, often so they can instead focus on a career.
Edit: I want to point out that what I’m describing is the consensus, as I understand it, of mainstream experts in the US. However, I believe there is evidence that this consensus opinion is not entirely accurate. If I’m not mistaken, surveys indicate that there are a fair number of people who would like to have children but are not because the right circumstances are not present for them to feel secure enough to have children. Many of the people who are not having children would have them if they felt more financially, romantically, and/or emotionally secure. Therefore, it’s possible that it’s not so much that people are choosing not to have children as it is that the necessary conditions for making people feel secure enough to have children are not present for a large number of people.
often so they can instead focus on a career.
Corpo speak people are broke… I expect better here
Vast majority of people don’t have “careers”
Whatever that clown term even means.
We work for money lol
That’s more than a bit insulting to the women of the world choosing to work instead of have kids. Sure, some of them are forced to because they wouldn’t have enough money to live without a job. And many of the jobs these women have chosen aren’t necessarily long term careers.
But it’s condescending and insulting to say those women have no other contributions to the world outside of working a menial day job and would rather stay at home having kids if only they could afford it. Calling a career a clown term is so edgy and cool of you! As if there aren’t people out there who absolutely love what they do for a living and aren’t happily working for crap pay just to do what they love. All of the adult women I know who have chosen not to have kids have really good careers, and all but one have a great salary.
And to your point that the vast majority of people don’t have “careers,” sometimes an entry level position that is just a day job and not really a career can lead to a bigger career. My mom started as a secretary at a small company and showed she knew how to do the job of her boss, so she got his job when he left. Then she ended up starting her own business in that field, which absolutely flourished and became the thing she did for the next 30 years.
“Corpo speak…” you are such a tool.
Nice anecdote but way to miss the point champ jfc
I personally felt like it was a reference to the complete lack of corporate loyalty to it’s employees.
It’s hard to have a “career” in the classical sense the way my 90 year old grandparents did.
You can still choose a field of work and if you’re lucky you’ll get to stay in it for most of your adult life, but between outsourcing in IT, fields being made redundant as technology advances/changes (from cashiers and retail to journalism and marketing, accounting, and phone work) and whole fields of manufacturing work getting shipped overseas, the number of lifelong fields of work available is rapidly shrinking, facing fierce competition for jobs, and becoming a moving playing field faster than most people can retrain for.
“HR” jobs could get halved or more with chatbots providing benefits and payroll adjustment information. “Big data” is doing most of the “market research” that advertisers handled manually 30 years ago.
Big money is still trying to sell us the “career” dream because it leads to the school loan debt they feed off of and temporarily gluts fields with workers to reduce salaries, but only a few handfuls of fields of work really have “career” style options anymore.
I took it not as an insult to the people trying to have one, but as disdain and disgust at how the word gets bandied about like so much bait on a hook when the reality is fastly becoming far different for the 20- and 30- somethings of today.
That might be just me being both charitable and jaded, though.
The dude said, “corpo speak people are broke” and said career is a clown term. I agree with almost everything you said, but the dude was saying that women who say they are focusing on their careers are only saying that because they are broke. He might be trying to imply all the stuff you said, but he definitely succeeded in sounding like a misogynistic ass.
Also, a career is not the same as working for the same company for a long time. A job is at a company, a career is your collected body of work. Focusing on your career might mean focusing on building a reputation so you can work where you want for how much you want.
"A reduction in the share of workers can lead to labor shortages, which may raise the bargaining power of employees and lift wages — all of which is ultimately inflationary,” Simona Paravani-Mellinghoff, managing director at BlackRock, wrote in an analysis last year.
And while net immigration has helped offset demographic problems facing rich countries in the past, the shrinking population is now a global phenomenon. “This is critical because it implies advanced economies may start to struggle to ‘import’ labour from such places either via migration or sourcing goods,” wrote Paravani-Mellinghoff.
This is just mask-off capitalism. They want people to have a lot of babies, and/or large numbers of poor and desperate people migrating into the country, so that they have a constant, reliable source of cheap labor.
Paying workers more is inflationary, but raising the cost of goods because you control the supply chain is “business”
Basically, raising product costs to cover increased labour costs are bad because actual workers are getting that money instead of the wealthy capital class.
I wish people understood boycotting more. Sure 6 companies own everything, but remember when the cost of a barrel of oil went significantly negative because people weren’t driving for 2 weeks?
If people collectively decided they didn’t want to buy anything but the absolute necessary staples for a few months there would be an absolute catastrophe in the supply chain and they’d be forced to lower prices significantly.
They may not lower prices forever, but modern business is built entirely on supply chain logistics. If people stop buying anything, or buy things exclusively to return them we would see some serious changes
I’ve tried to convince people that if we can have a No Nut November, we ought to be able to put together a No-Sales September or something. These mentally defective executives would absolutely go back to taking care of the customer if this were a practice.
We should definitely do November for it - holiday shopping and Black Friday specifically.
Hell, if we could just boycott Black Friday and the week before and after, which is the biggest retail spend of the year, we’d probably make a serious dent. They aren’t even good deals, but good luck convincing anyone to skip it who doesn’t already.
You know what slows down inflation? An upper limit on the cost of goods. But hey im just a filthy commie.
It didn’t, not in the US, not in Soviet Union
In the Soviet Union it caused rationing instead. Here’s your coupon for 1 stick of butter
Sure buddy those are the only two countries that have existed in the world. So can’t work anywhere.
It doesn’t work because it’s a stupid idea.
If there’s a cap on the price of a type of good, then obviously only the lowest quality things get made. If you cap shoes to $10, they will only sell shoes imported from sweatshops.
If you specify exactly how something is made, like $20 for made in USA shoes, they will import it from a sweatshop and sew a logo on it in the US.
If you specify how much labor must be done in the US, there’s a chance nobody would bother since selling the $10 sweatshop shoe has better profit margins
Yeah thats not how the prices are set tho so your entire premise and basis is stupid. Have a good day. Do some reading.
What country would you point to as a success for this policy?
Can i have your list of valid countries to choose from so that my answer doesn’t get disqualified for picking a third world country.
a maximum retail price exists for most if not all goods in India. And it helps slow down inflation.
India would be perfectly valid if it wasn’t experiencing high inflation just like everyone else. Which it is.
https://finimize.com/content/rbi-chief-urges-india-to-cut-inflation-despite-strong-growth
You can’t fix inflation just by setting a max price. It leads to shortages or (more common in India’s case) retailers finding loopholes:
Didn’t say it solves inflation. You cant stop a global phenomenon happening. You can ease it.
I knew even before I opened the article it’s gonna be about fewer babies = fewer workers. Remember folks, when an article cites the “economy”, it just means the businesses and industries’ profits.
I’d like to put Simona’s mind at ease because economics research into the relationship between wages and productivity shows a casual link where higher wages increase productivity. That is, higher wages force firms to invest in technology, equipment and training in order to offset the increased labor cost.
Sounds awesome. Bring it on. Less people is better fuck the infinite growth economy
The problems listed in the article are real. we’ve built a system:
- Where a lot of economic growth stems from an increasing supply of (cheap) labour
- That relies on people of working age being able to financially support a retiree class.
Both of these are going to fall apart if the population stops growing. The smaller group of working age people won’t be enough to support the amount of retirees, and without population growth there’s no economic growth.
It’s sad that economists correctly see all this coming but then conclude that the only solution is “make more babies.” It’s short term thinking almost by definition, because in the limit it’s rather obvious that at some point we will not have the resources to support any more people. And the closer we get to that limit the less each individual person will have (even worse when wealth is not equally distributed).
Unfortunately I don’t see any economist putting forth a plan that accepts population decline and alters the system to account for it. It wouldn’t be easy but it seems no one is even trying.
How is it not easy? 90% of all jobs are automated or are going to be automated away in the next few years. I only see one social class that holds us back from de facto post-scarcity. We just need to get rid of it.
I commend your optimism, but personally I’m not sure automation is actually going to carry us through this in the time frames that we need. This population problem is going to hit really hard in the next twenty to thirty years. I don’t think we’re going to fully automate the world economy in that time.
2 thoughts:
- the level of automation we have right now is enough to produce most of the stuff we need with very little assistance, as most of the useful stuff has been automated 30-40 years ago; while i agree that we are missing some important things, i think the real problem is the cleptocracy at the top
- the stuff that is being automated now is really a problem more than a solution, and is going to stop progress by putting out of work software developers and other creative professions. I’m not saying it’s going to replace them all, but if it replaces enough job positions, it’s going to make the profession a risky choice for new students and that’s going to slow down the engine a lot
Not even close. Despite the hype being pushed by tech companies the latest wave of AI has extremely niche use cases and it’s already beginning to plateau.
In a world with too many humans already, can you imagine painting a drop in the birth rate as somehow a bad thing?
lol
I don’t really care about its impact on the economy, but I do feel for those who are attempting to have a child to no avail. I can only imagine how soul crushing that process can be.
Thanks for remembering us Not Rick.
Where do you live where the economy doesn’t affect you?
I don’t, those people are selfish. Creating an unwilling life destined to be yet another cog in the machine while the world burns just to satisfy one’s own animalistic desire to have some form of genetic spawn. I silently cheer every time “struggling” couples miscarry and are unwittingly forced to do the right thing and not have kids.
Lol. There is nothing in existence which has a choice of its being thrown into existence. Is all existence immoral?
Those people do not share your perspective. I do view it as largely subconsciously selfish, but your take is fucked up.
My take is fucked up only because we continue to ascribe reproduction as some noble, precious thing; rather than a wildly irresponsible and selfish act.
Imagine a couple is driving a truckload of garbage to dump in the ocean. They have no reason to do this except some primal instinct that tells them to, all so they can point at the pile of floating garbage afterwards and say “look, that is MY garbage”.
Now imagine on the way to the ocean, the truck loses a tire and they crash off the road next to a garbage dump, and all the garbage in their truck goes flying over the fence and into the dump.
Then these people want and expect sympathy from others because they lost their garbage. They were really looking forward to standing on the beach and watching their garbage float free into the ocean and cause more of a mess. Oh no, boo hoo, fate accidentally caused them to do the right thing.
Lmao what is this edge-lord shit?
MFW my parents didn’t even attempt to invent a time machine to ask if it was cool to conceive me or not
“Fertility crisis” in the headline doesn’t refer to anyone’s inability to have children. It refers to the fertility rate, which is just statistics about how many kids are popping out.
The problem is the average age increases, and you’ll have more of an elderly population, meaning barely any people actually working while a ton of people are on pensions
Then invest in medical research on keeping me young for longer, instead of keeping me old for longer
That’s why I’m living now, not waiting for retirement. I got a good 15 years left, maybe 20 if I push it. Then I’m tapping out. Not a fan of keeping on living just for the sake of breathing.
The best way you can help fight climate change is to not have children.
This statement always reminds me of the movie Idiocracy.
Fortunately, intelligence appears to have a wide range of genetic factors. Stupid parents can have quite intelligent children.
The documentary, at this point.
That means the supply of workers in many countries is quickly diminishing.
I thought AI was going to take our jobs.
Of course it is! We are simultaneously facing a labor shortage and mass unemployment. The important thing is to keep being angry and frightened, the specific subject you’re angry about at any given time is flexible.
You can have both a labor shortage and mass unemployment. It occurs when workers are skilled for an industry with decreasing or no demand while another industry that requires different skills has increasing demand.
A good example of this is the high demand in the US for so called “Blue Collar” jobs. We have a shortage of trades people (Electricians, Plumbers, HVAC, etc) and far too many Business and Marketing people. There’s 100,000 MBA’s out there looking for a job and there’s 100,000 Plumbing Contractors trying to hire someone.
Right? They must not think AI and automation can replace very many human laborers, otherwise they wouldn’t consider declining birth rates to be such a crisis.
The problem with capitalism, is eventually you run out of other people’s labor
You run out of other people’s money. You can squeeze labor to starvation working in a salt mine. However, if most all people lose all their money, capitalism is done, and currently runaway capitalism is doing everything it can to increase that disparity.
Then falling birthrate shouldn’t be an issue?
This person was referencing the obtuse and infuriatingly repeated quote from Margaret Thatcher (rot in piss) “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money”.
I don’t think I need to point out exactly why this quote is stupid.
I had no idea she said that. No, I’m not a Thatcher fan.
Capitalism is just a complex pyramid scheme. Change my mind.
No, you’re correct.
Half my life was spent fearing the result of limitless population growth and contemplating the inevitability of war and famine to shock population levels back down to sustainable levels. They warned us about this starting at least as far back as the sixties.
I see organic population collapse as a categorically good thing.
Long-term, possibly. But if the collapse happens too quickly it may cause a lot of issues. A slow steady decline would be best but may be difficult to achieve.
The oligarchy is welcome to not poison people.
That’s why I tell hard-right folks that childless homosexuality is the cornerstone of God’s plan to save humanity
Remember kids, “the economy” is double-speak for “record breaking profits for the rich”.
Personally, I always substitute it with “rich people’s yacht money”
Infinite growth is an absolutely insane bar to set for the economy.
The lowered birthrates are because we’re getting ground into dust - my engineering team of twenty millennials has two folks with kids and two folks who openly plan on having kids… we’re aging out of the window and it’s not that we’re trying and failing - most of us just don’t want a fucking family. We’re too fucking busy already.
Mental health never being addressed, so we’re also too tired.
I got an hour long seminar at 12, wagie!
We will fix u
“Burned outs just another word for not taking your bosses shit” - sing it to the tune of Me and Bobby McGee.
Viruses, Pyramid Schemes and Capitalism, oh my!
There are more people in the world than ever before and we have folks writing news stories telling us there’s a crisis building and that we need to have more kids?
They’re farming us like ranch animals.
Infinite growth requires infinite bodies to feed it.
Unfortunately I don’t have infinite fucks to give
I think our planet would be described as a free-range human labour farm, to anyone who was able to view it independently. Well, lots of it not so free-range. Its why they’re coming for reproductive freedom. They’re doing for the same reason a beef farmer wouldn’t give their cows reproductive freedom.
Always were
Look at long term trends, population is already dropping in East Asia and Europe
Sure, there might be more people in Nigeria, but they are not paying into your retirement
Yeah maybe this way of handling retirement doesn’t work? It’s clearly a pyramid scheme.
Obviously, but how do you fix it without getting more workers? No scheme would work without people doing work.
Society needs farmers and doctors. Like it or not, everything else is optional.
Where are you going to get new doctors if everyone in your society is 70 years old
Nurses are now optional? EMTs? Firefighters? Military personnel? Police?
I’m talking about necessary for the species to carry on existing. And yes I grew up in a place with no police, no military, no EMTs, no firefighters. We had a nurse though. If someone did something that would normally involve the police, it was settled by the parties involved. (If you got drunk and drove through someone’s fence, they’d show you up at your house with a roll of barbed wire and some fence posts and you’d have to fix it. Possibly also round up any escaped sheep)
Enjoy being conquered by another country if you don’t have a military. Sure, the species will survive, but you may not
