Political Memes

It seems to be a totally naturally occurring phenomenon happening everywhere. We're developing more as a species and having less offspring as a result. Its predicted that we will hit our planets population maximum this century. Its entirely possible that the human species will never have more then 10 billion people on the planet at once. Thats our high score.

It’s not just capitalism though, it’s innovation and the arts. Our development as a species is partly contingent on population, on more chances of finding that genius, more excess capacity that can be devoted to things not obviously profitable. I disagree with the open endedness of your statement, the rate of change.

Given

• we can’t keep growing
• we’re probably beyond sustainable capacity for this planet

I’ll agree with

• we need to slow and stop population growth
• shrinking population would be better

But disagree

• the rate of drop is important - we want to reduce harm, societal stress, conflict
• we want to plateau at some population well into the billions but less than today

Most importantly, fertility trends look like we’re heading for a fairly steep drop in population as the current generations age out and pass. We are heading toward disruption, societal stress, conflict.

It’s unclear how to stabilize the birth rate for that lower plateau, since we’re mature enough to not go back to oppressing women (I hope), but clearly we’re disincenting children and will quite likely regret that in a generation or two, for most developed countries. For the long term future of humanity and our society, we need to start making tweaks now, when they’re just tweaks. Start making it easier to have children. Start helping parents more. Start making it easier to grow up. Look after our future as a species rather than freeload off the personal choices of individuals.

I do compare it with our treatment of climate change. We failed to make small changes when small changes would have been sufficient. The longer we wait, the bigger, more disruptive, more expensive the changes will need to be. We’re bad at looking ahead and setting longe term priorities but need to get better fast

Actually would be nice if worker pop drops so hard the value of workers goes up.

"you're not producing enough capital batteries"

I think some in this thread do not fully realize what some of the inherent problems of capitalism are and how they relate to this issue.

In a capitalist economy resources and labour are generally allocated in a way that maximizes profit. Profit is determined based on the prices of things and prices are determined by the exchange value of those things. That often results in the price of something being way higher than what it cost to make it. One result of this is that capitalist economies allocate enormous amount of resources and labour to things that don't have any beneficial value to society. For example, some of the most skilled labour in America is tasked with figuring out how to get as many people as possible to spend as much time as possible looking at anger-inducing content on their phones. This isn't contributing in any meaningful, positive way to solving society's known, difficult long term problems, like ageing population. In fact it likely does the opposite.

In contrast, a socialist economy allocates resources and labour according to society's needs, which are determined by some mix of economic planning and limited market dynamics. Prices of things are determined through these processes and generally represent how much labour goes into them. As a result, keeping people angry wouldn't get many skilled engineers allocated to. Instead these people's labour would for example be employed in automating the shit out of the vital sectors for society's long term well-being. Like automation in agriculture, healthcare and elder care. And then since labour isn't allocated or paid on the basis of profit, the socialist economy can keep labour employed in sectors where proven automation already exists and gradually ramp up automation as they retire. Alternatively it could let people retire earlier, or have them do other work if they want to, like community service, or art, or R&D, or childcare, etc. As a result a socialist economy has a better ability to sustain itself with less labour while taking care of its elderly, without enduring crises.

Worse, a capitalist economy has to go through the real material changes, actually allocating labour and resources, producing the things it would produce with its current configuration in order for it to figure out what to change and what to do next. Thus we're faced with the horror of all these bad decisions that we currently see basically locked-in and consuming vast resources and labour until they become unprofitable or resources or labour are exhausted. Which means we're very likely to run into crises before the system adjusts to the new realities of diminished labour force. And then we'd likely (as we already are) rush into solving that by importing labour, which is going to get us into social instability due to racism, and we know how that goes. There are plenty current examples to go around. Meanwhile an economy that can do planning can model ahead of time what different future economic configurations would look like, make projections, choose a desired one and have resources and labour allocated on solutions today, thus increase the chances of avoiding acute socioeconomic crises or minimize their scale.

I hope this helps understanding the premise.

And for today's misallocation of resources in capitalism I give you - https://sh.itjust.works/comment/18820691.

And a medium term crisis for elderly care

It usually always translates to "We really need more poor and working class labor so pump out more wage slaves." We could be a way better society if we move past enriching billionaires and the rich.

They are kind of a crisis for pensions, mind. The whole idea of a state pension is that for every worker there are approximately two more paying in to cover the costs of the pensions. Every generation is paying the pensions of the previous generation. Obviously it's actually less than two because of tax brackets and the fact that people die early, but on the whole, it's roughly two people.

If population declines, well you're gonna have to re-think your pensions and social care and find the money and/or labour somehow.

OK - hear me out.

https://muppet.fandom.com/wiki/Hurling_Day

Yeah, capitalism sucks - but the greying population is an issue all the younger gens have to deal with. Once again the problem is boomers (not their fault for being born though). Thankfully, Jim Henson gave us a solution.

Agree, when I hear billionaires complain about low birth rates I don't relate. Your problem, not mine. Maybe make it more affordable and less impactful on the planet, then it's more tolerable, but otherwise not really.

Humans are the most overabundant resource on the planet...if capitalism actually functioned, the system wouldn't incentivize creating more.

But the current economic system isn't even true capitalism...it's optimized wage enslavement paired with a caste system. Keeping labor pools well stocked depresses the value of replacing individual units...all they're figuring out now is how best to trim maintenance costs.

Capitalism can exist on a gold standard, or a barter system of goods, which if we were on those systems then a shrinking population would do nothing inherently negative.

The thing that breaks with a declining birth rate is monetary policy, which requires an ever growing money supply because we've designed a 2% inflation target, which means growing consumption via debt monetization. The reason for 2% inflation is to monetize our debt, in order to force people onto the risk curve for economic growth; we grow the money supply about 6% a year to achieve 2% inflation due to technological advances and a broken CPI index.

There is enough out there for everyone to live a happy life. We just have to realize it.