Infinite growth of human population would hit a hard ceiling on earth resources real soon.
People not having babies is a good thing.
The 1st 40years of my life i was told I had to worry about over population, in the last 5 I’ve been told I now need to worry about “demographic collapse”
It’s not about infinite growth.
Given that not everyone lives to old age, we would expect children to outnumber old people even in a zero (or slightly negative) percent growth scenario.
Sure but lets allow the world population to naturally contract to 500 million or so before we start pushing for replacement numbers
I agree. I chose not to have kids for various reasons. And my “skilled” lol trade skills will die with me.
Right on. The way the way population is right now, every time a chunk of mountain or glacier falls down, or a river floods, tens of thousands die or are displaced.
In 1960 there were 2-3 billion people on the planet. Now it’s 3x as many cars, mouths to feed, homes to heat/cool.
In Bangladesh there are over 1 million Rohingan refugees who’ve been there for TEN YEARS. They can’t work there, have no country to move to, have to live on $6-12 a month for food.
It’s actually more than 2-3x as many cars I believe, given cultural changes since 1960 as well
Sounds like a situation that will self correct in a few decades, no?
People think we need to keep growing the population. We’re stuck on a single planet together. If we could live on the moon or Mars it would be a different story, but I think it’s perfectly fine to decrease the population size back to 1980s levels, at least.
And we’re talking about the elderly who don’t add any productivity to the planet too.
Sure, some minority of boomers have a good attitude and want to work for the planet and the future generations, but the reality is that a majority of them have piss poor values and are now a net drain on society.
Plenty of people in other age groups that are also a net drain on society. We won’t get far if we don’t see it as the class issue that it mostly is.
Ua the issue isnt age groups but the distribution of resources and access to political power of different classes.
An 89 year old member of their local community centre will always be more useful to the humanity , and evem the planet , than a 29 year old billionaire lol
Other age groups don’t entire half the damn economy. Boomers are a class unto themselves.
Billionaires collectively own about 10 trillion in the US, Boomers collectively over 80 trillion.
Just going with the US because it’s the best known example. It’s not very dissimilar in other western countries but the US is the worst I believe.
Not really, unless Gen Z starts having a fuckload of babies soon. Because each generation will be progressively smaller if the fertility rates don’t rise.
It’s not a huge issue in the third world where your kids are your retirement plan anyway so they have a ton more children. In the developed world, we have pension systems and stuff so on an individual level, having kids is likely bad for you financially, you want other people to have kids so you don’t have to spend a bunch of money raising them, but their taxes pay for your retirement.
Just funnel money from billionaires into it and problem solved. We can keep the aame money in circulation, half the population, and be fine. I see no issue with lowering birth rates, and wvery issue with a lack of policy changes surrounding it
Replying from my other account because I’m too lazy to relog into sopuli on my phone but:
It’s not that simple. Take the US. Billionaires collectively own about 10 trillion. Boomers collectively over 80 trillion. You take every single cent away from billionaires and you barely make a difference in people’s ability to retire. I mean you should still do that. But money that isn’t backed by labor or goods moving around in the economy is kinda useless and you need people to produce said goods and provide services. All that billionaire moolah is mostly predicated on everyone holding all their stock because stock values fall apart when people sell. You could sell a few million worth of stock and cause that company’s value to go down a billion. It’s smokes and mirrors.
Unless there’s some horrible disaster in the coming decades that will kill billions and harm wealthy old people less.
Technically, probably yes, one way or another…
All of us dying alone while some fools bring more children for the billionaires to abuse.
People live longer every decade and the definition of Senior Citizen doesn’t change. This would not be a bad fact on its own…but declining birth rates can cause many issues.
they’re hiring caregivers like crazy in my state
Unionizing opportunity.
Ha, and then they will continue to pay them shit and then fire everyone. The us is not union compatible with current us labour laws.
I mean they should still do it, but paying jobs are thin enough that there will always be scabs.
Not even close to true
well 1 out of 23 humans checking to see if random internet claims are true is better odds than i expected, well done sir
Okay but you’re looking at more than just white people
Maybe true if you’re comparing 60+ to under 5
If you select North America and slide the slider between 2050 and 2080 it looks like a face opening their mouth and screaming.
It’s because a bunch of African countries don’t have retirement or pensions the way most of the developed worlds do so you have to have kids of your own. In Europe, north America and many Asian countries, we want other people to make the kids that bring the future of the economy, because having kids is expensive and thanks to social safety nets, other people’s kids will end up taking care of you via taxes anyway.
1950’s America with that flared base!
Its really only Africa that bucks the trend if you Iook region by region.
theres also Latin America and Oceania too to a degree but ya you get my point.
Robots will take care of us. Meanwhile we’ll be begging for death and they will keep us alive -_-
would it be better if the population was growing past 9bn?
There’s a stable population the ecosystem can support and I’m pretty sure 9bn is too fuckin many.
not that I’m volunteering to free up space tho… there’s a whole lot of techbro chuds who think there’s way too many people, but their motivations are pretty genocidal tbh.
honestly we’re fucked in either direction, but I suspect there’s a lot of reasons the population total will go down once the climate crisis starts shifting millions of people around.
yes growth would be better for me so there are more young people to support the old people
I don’t have enough to give so much to old people
more young people to support the old people
But human labor is incredibly efficienct in the modern day. You don’t need ten young people for every one old person - nine of whom die by their mid-30s - so that everyone doesn’t starve.
But the role of elderly people has changed so much in the last century. On a national scale, they’re no longer master craftsmen or child caregivers or elder advisors. They’re just the base of the consumer economy and the electoral pool.
As democracy fails and the economy becomes more fixated on tech capital than quality of life, they’re marked out as increasingly expendable.
It isn’t that we need more young people so much as we’ve alienated and de-skilled our old people.
Your old people don’t really need any skills when they own most of the economy. People over 55 own 52% of everything in the US. And that’s how retirement works, whether you have a government as a middle man via taxes or the old people have their investments, they have to live off the backs of the young. The investments, after all, are mostly ownership of companies that the young people work for. Companies that do their best not to raise wages so the shareholders (boomers) can have a better retirement.
If people want to retire in their 60s, there needs to be growth happening all the time, until we’ve entirely gotten rid of the need for human labor.
selfish prick wants the population to grow so he has more servants at the nursing home
Karma for them being dicks.
Low birth rates are a crisis for capitalism, not humanity. And if you count brown countries, it’s not even happening.
Pension schemes are not a biological imperative.
Just for clarification, if we’re talking about sub replacement fertility rates then it would be “brown countries” except for India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Iran, Lebanon, UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, Brazil, Mexico, Chile, Argentina, Costa Rica and Cuba and more. Might be an invalid generalization now.
I think India is at threshold now.
It’s past threshold now at 1.9 and falling quickly.
Not really anything to do with capitalism. If the ratio of workers to non-workers decreases without a proportionate increase in productivity, a higher proportion of workers’ time has to be spent catering to the needs of non-workers. That means less time spent not working and/or less time spent producing unnecessary stuff that improves our lives like chocolate or TV shows.
We grow several times more food than humanity can possibly eat. We don’t have a productivity or resource shortage. We have an allocation error.
I don’t think this is true. I checked the stats for caloric supply and the highest value worldwide is (unsurprisingly) in North America where about 3,500 calories of food are produced per day. That is less than double what a person needs per day, so “several times” seems unlikely.
But I don’t dispute the idea that we produce enough food to feed the world. But I also didn’t say we didn’t.
Could you comment on what I actually said, which is that an ageing population (or any situation in which there are more non-workers per worker) will result in less production being available for people on average?
This is not just about food; it is also about other necessities (such as healthcare) but also non-essentials like entertainment. The problem of an ageing population is not that we’ll starve to death; it’s that our quality of life will decrease.
That’s not what I said. That site measures the output of the chain. I said we grow more food (ie plants) than humanity can eat. We feed the majority of that food to the livestock we keep that absolutely dwarfs the biomass of all wild animals. That introduces a 90%+ caloric inefficiency. If we just ate the plants, we would have to stop growing so much food, even all our industrial processes don’t demand that much. But capitalism demands instead that we keep growing more food than the year before, and so it demands inefficiencies like animal ag. Any scarcity is entirely engineered. It’s not an accident, it’s by design. It is necessary to maximize investor return.
We feed the majority of that food to the livestock
no, humans consume about 2/3 of global crop calories
No, it’s because people like eating meat. You may have noticed that people ate meat centuries ago before capitalism existed, and favoured it over other foods when it was available.
But I understand what you meant about growing multiples of food, now, so that’s good.
This isn’t just about food, but look at the number of people one farmer could feed 200 years ago (6 or so) vs today (150 or so). We spend a lot of our productive time today doing stuff we didn’t have time for just a couple hundred years ago. We’ve got a long way to fall before we are unable as a species to meet our needs. Proponents of tech advances expect our productivity to increase even if the workforce shrinks. If our standard of living delines on average, either these prognosticators are incorrect or we have a huge allocation issue.
I think it is a problem if we need to have less free time, or work more for the same things that we do in our free time, because a higher proportion of worker time needs to be spent supporting people who are not working. You don’t want to go back 200 years even if humanity could survive in such conditions. (And the present population probably could not survive)
congrats, you’ve described capitalism
if we didn’t need to make corporate profits, communities could look after each other
You do know that corporate profits are literally where old people get their money, right?
Take the posterchild of capitalism as an example, the US. People over 55 own 52% of all assets, from money to homes to companies. As a group they outweigh the billionaire class about 8 to 1 by wealth (and of course most billionaires are themselves also old). That’s how retirement investments work, you live off the backs of young people who work.
Get rid of capitalism, you just get a different way to route young people’s productivity to old people. Hell, get rid of currency and it doesn’t change. Everyone’s producing food and goods, but a large share of it goes to people who are old and no longer work. The larger the share of people not working, the larger the burden on the people not working.
Unless the population is constantly growing, retirement is a burden on young people regardless of economic system.
Nothing I said related to capitalism at all as far as I can see, so you’re going to have to connect the dots for me if you want me to understand, sorry.
we already have enough productivity
why do you think we need more?
I think if we decrease productivity, it will cause problems.
but it’s not going to decrease. it’s just not going to be spent on unnecessary stuff like toiling for corporate profits
So productivity as measured today is only going to decrease by the amount corresponding to corporate profits? How do you figure? What is that amount - do you have an estimate?
As the other reply points out, profits are probably not what you care about anyway, because profits often just become the savings of ordinary people. So you want the proportion of profits that go to the already wealthy, plus the salaries of the mega wealthy.
But regardless, that figure is some finite number and you’re saying it’s more than the productivity we’re going to lose due to an ageing population: how do you know? Actual estimates for how much we could free up by getting rid of profits and CEOs are highly uncertain and often negative.
Corporate profits ARE old people’s retirement. Over 55s own 52% of the entire US economy. Boomers own 8 times more than billionaires. It’s similar in all western countries though perhaps not all are as bad. Billionaires are leeches but old people in general are the bigger drain on an aging society.
Except for population to grow it requires children which also don’t work, require more resources than elderly, and at the end of 20 years instead of freeing up resources (by dying like the elderly), continue to consume resources.
At the end of 20 years a child becomes an adult, who will (on average) be a net producer. It’s true that children cost more in work put into raising them than older adults take in work to look after them, yet it is a fact of life that one working human is capable of producing more stuff than just that which they themselves needs or makes use of - otherwise it would be impossible to raise children. This should be obvious, and means that the problem of an increasing birth rate, from this perspective, is at most temporary.
But I didn’t say we should have high birth rates, I said that the problems of low birth rates are not due to capitalism.
Land isn’t unlimited. Physical resources aren’t unlimited. For example while a person can manufacture more batteries, with more people on the planet each battery will be more expensive for everyone because each is vying for the same limited resources that are used to make a battery.
I also wouldn’t say that low birthrate is caused by capitalism but by over population. No economic system can sustain unlimited growth. When too many are competing for too few resources, there is no time for families.
You are not talking about what I was talking about, my friend.
The problem you describe as “temporary” implies that once your children are grown, they don’t have further children that will use more resources.
A worker in a growing population can somehow support 4 children and 2 parents (6 dependents) yet supporting only 2 parents and no children (2 dependents) is a problem?
So no, it’s not “temporary”. It’s a pyramid that eventually grows such that the foundation must crumble from the weight of everyone above.
You are still talking about growth. I am comparing two scenarios: one where the population shrinks (and therefore gets older on average) and one where our doesn’t, and remains the same average age. I am not saying we need to grow the population forever, and never have.
I suggest you reread my comments to see where you’ve misunderstood, but it’s up to you.
Not really anything to do with capitalism. If
You think for-profit healthcare, including elder care, pharma care, and long-term care, aren’t a huge problem with capitalism written all over it, with every layer maximizing profits and minimizing services, then I urge you to re-assess it.
I can’t really connect this comment with what you originally said. Maybe this will help clarify my position: I think countries with public health and social care, just like countries with mainly private health and social care, will have severe problems if they can’t arrest the rate at which their populations are ageing. My comment explains in very general terms why I think that is the case.
Who gives a shit. I’ll be dead.
The tricky part of being in society is that we want systems that work for more than just ourselves: It’s not a purely transactional relationship.
Great news! It doesn’t affect you either way, so we know your opinion on the matter is completely unbiased. That’s excellent.
Right now, a crisis for capitalism is a crisis for all of us, because that’s where we live.
Maybe addressing the source of the problem is a better strategy than trying to blame the symptoms?
Sure, and maybe it’s part of what pushes us to something better, but to act like it won’t have effects is not helpful.
Yes, this IS fine. There’s too many people on this fucking planet. The only reason this is considered a problem is because capitalism and the Bible says so.
No other reason. Period.
While I half agree with you, that’s definitely not the only issue.
Senior citizens become people to take care of, that won’t/can’t work and I don’t mean that in a “dear God consider the GDP” way, but literally just people who will not be contributing but still require services, in fact likely a lot more than normal.
It ends up being a lot of neglected senior citizens dying in horrible ways.
Senior citizens become people to take care of,
Children need more resources to raise than seniors take.
I suppose if you are just thinking about things like cost of formula, diapers, clothes, education. In terms of time spent, children take less and less one on one time as each year passes. They have a finite timeline of required care.
The elderly become less and less independant, the care they require becomes more and more medical in nature, and there is no timeline. Someone with dementia can require around the clock medical care for decades.
Yes, the medical care is 1000x more than cost of food and things.
An infant requires more constant care than a dying elderly. Parents are on rotation 24/7 for the first year. That’s more than elderly get in hospice.
Moneywise it’s $600k for a child. $400k from parents. $200k from the state for the free k-12 education.
Elderly on average have $200k in savings age 65-74 and spend $155k in medical costs their last 3 years.
Children are more expensive in money and direct labor.
Not really. The unique expense for a kid is education compared to the old, and elder care can easily eclipse that.
The unique expense for a kid is education
Young kids require a lot of health care, tbf
I said unique, old people need a lot of health care, generally way more than a kid. Most kids after birth just have routine checkups and not much else. Infants might get a bit more doctor visits because the parents don’t know if they should worry or not because the infant can’t speak, but generally even those amount to nothing.
Babies more universally need diapers than old folks, and do eat more than an older person, but health care is absolutely bigger for elderly.
Cost per child is $300k, $400k including college. The state (which means workers’ taxes) chip in an average of $17k / year for k-12 which is another $200k. That’s $600k per child, not including the free labor from the parents.
The average savings for someone 65-74 is $200k. End of life costs are $155k for the last 3 years.
…uhh… do you have ANY citation for those numbers?
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cost-to-raise-a-child-300000-us-state-by-state/
https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statistics
I used low numbers of ranges and rounded down.
So you just said about 20 years of life is only twice that of the last three years of life for your starting figure. Add in college and it’s still not that egregiously more.
You feel the need to add public school costs, but not add in medicare, social security, and other expenses exclusive to old age.
Medicare and SS are prepaid. So you need to figure out the difference between if that money was invested instead of taken in taxes. Then it would be the amount that retires take over that amount.
Please show numbers!
Cost per child is $300k, $400k including college.
Only one in three Millennials have gone to college, so you’ll need to pro-rate this. You’re also talking about a population that begun employment between 14-17, even in an advanced economy like the US. So that cost is offset by revenue, especially in those later years.
Not with modern lifespans, 75-95 take a ton of care and are unable to contribute
Average 64-75 have $200k savings and spend $155k for last 3 years.
A child takes $600k. ($300k from parents. $100k college. $200k paid by state to cover the free k-12.)
yes and theres more old poeple than children, thats like, the whole point of the post??
There’s too many people on this fucking planet.
There’s really not. The human ecological footprint changes enormously by region. Relatively small populations in countries like Qatar and Brunei punch well outside their weight class in terms of ecological devestation.
A much smaller population that lived at this degree of pollution and destruction would be no better globally.
There’s really not. The human ecological footprint changes enormously by region. Relatively small populations in countries like Qatar and Brunei punch well outside their weight class in terms of ecological devestation.
Yeah, uh, the oil produced by those small populations is used in places like China, Europe and Australia too. In fact they export most of their oil, so we all share that blame.
Since more people in the world are in China and India you are probably wrong about it being the Bible. It is religious texts that encourage more reproduction for religious spreading to the masses and China just has more landmass so more people overall
So what’s your alternative? Infinite growth?
Term limits on life.
Limits on wealth.
We already have that.
Elderly population falls off quickly after age 80
Not fast enough
you want to kill them ‘slowly and peacefully’, barbarian? Get help lol.
Even in ideal conditions most humans will be dying quickly after they hit 80+ , ESPECIALLY men , even with ideal nutriation and exercise . The human body’s telomeres were not constructed to support a person who wants to live past 100 thats why so many people who are 100+ are shockingly slow and weak compared to their primes from 20s-early 40s. Even if theybwere athletes lol
You can fight and try all you want to resist death once you hit the big 100. And yea some of your efforts will work for a while Good nutrition will make it so that you have the things inside you that you need to functiom. Caretakers will ensure that you are able to reach what you cannot reach any more. Exercise , especially resistance exercise , will help you to stay mobile and stong enough to lift yourself after youve fallen… But these efforts are NOTHING in comparison to what your shortened telomeres will wreak on your body once youve hit an old enough age.
It should be noted we have no documented evidence of a person living past 117.
There’s a reason for this…
Who the fuck asked lmao
After all this time humanity finally created a world with high life expectancy, just to start wondering now whether we should.
As long as that high lifespan comes with a high healthspan, it shouldn’t be a problem.
As long as it comes with a high healthspan AND people working longer, it shouldn’t be a problem.
If people have an extra few decades to live off young people’s productivity, that kinda screws the young people whose numbers are dwindling.
We already have more productivity than what we know what to do with, and it’s only going to get worse/better (depending on how we handle it).
But yeah, I’d imagine this would be the case and hope we will be able to do more meaningful work in the future.
True, but that’s not the case yet. Old people generally need healthcare and other services (provided by young people).
And they don’t provide anything in return from their care homes. Honestly, it’s best to just send them off on an ice floe.
It would be better to keep them integrated in communities so they can serve as elders- providing advice, supporting children and parents, and spreading their community’s history.
The care homes are the problem, not the need for care.
True, that would be even better but sounds like communism so it won’t happen. I would certainly prefer it over the ice floe thing
providing advice
They do, it’s called the republican party and conservative think tanks.
supporting children and parents
I mean other than your own family, why would you do that? Sounds like extra work when you want to be retired.
spreading their community’s history
That’s called Facebook, it exists. That’s where they spread their conservative politics.
You seem to think that old people would be interested in any of this. Most wouldn’t. They’re loaded, they can live like kings without being bothered by a bunch of young people. Why would anyone want to put in extra work when they don’t have to?
Why would anyone want to put in extra work when they don’t have to?
Most humans actually care about the communities and families that raised them. They will put in the work to give advice and help where they can for these groups whwn they grow old IF those groups cared about them as they were being raised.
A few do that, but mostly old people just own the entire world and complain how nobody wants to work anymore. But surely if we kick out all the immigrants (the hardest workers), things will be better.
Most of the older people I know already support their communities in some way. I’m sorry if the ones you know don’t.
I wonder if that’s a society-wide impulse where you are- are younger people active in the community where you live? Is there a sense of community at all?
After all this time humanity finally created a world with high life expectancy…
…and it only cost the sustainability of the lower class and the entire global south.
We fucked the climate up enough for it to cost the next generations the global north as well
That’s quite an achievement. We’re so awesome!
Of course we should. People dying is horrible. Anyone who thinks otherwise can opt in to check out.
If only that were legal in many places.
Of course I agree people dying is horrible, but there need to be enough people to take care of the elderly and to keep society running. Best hope for care robots I guess, although that seems dystopian too.
Only if there was a way to sustainably provide for an older population would that be not concerning. Otherwise, it’s gonna turn convervative af everywhere pretty soon.
look at the bright side, in about 10 years, housing will become affordable again
Good. There are too many people. Why do we want to expand on a 7billion+ population when so many of us are struggling? How about we only have as many people as we have resources for everyone having a good life?
I’m not arguing for population growth but we definitely have more than enough resources for everyone now. Scarcity isn’t the problem, it’s that we allow people to hoard those resources and we waste a ton of them.
When we can prove it by providing everyone the same (good) standard of life, across the entire world, then I’ll believe it.
Stuff like everyone has housing, clean safe water, safe to eat food, able to escape from extreme climate swings, healthcare, vacation, parental leave, and I’m sure lots more that I’m not thinking of.
Once everyone has that, then we can look at what we can expand on
We will never have that as long as we live in a capitalist society
literallt just this.
Capitalism DEMANDS Unequal Exchange. Notnonly to poor workers in The Global South get less of what they work for but also people in thr global north get less of their labour and its funneled to the billionaires. THIS is probably the most important issue in the world today other than Climste Change. THATS why I named myself this.
Jason Hickel et al. publisjhed two studies that you can find on Sci-Hub for free that talks about this. ALso Torkil Lauessen has a free audio bool on youtuibe titled ‘Unequal Exchange’ where he talks about just this issue.
“We have enough resources” is such a shitty god damned argument. At least you didn’t go “hurr durr everyone on the planet can fit in Manhattan if they just squeeze tightly”.
But god damned ask yourself what kind of world you want to live in, not min maxxing the number of people alive for some absolutely incomprehensible reason.
“WE CAN SQUEEZE ONE MORE IN THERE, BOYS! SHE CAN TAKE IT!”
For WHAT?! WHY?!
everyone on the planet can fit in Manhattan if they just squeeze tightly
But god damned ask yourself what kind of world you want to live in, not min maxxing the number of people alive for some absolutely incomprehensible reason.
Totally with you on these points. Having lived in NYC it is my conception of ultra-urban hell. Sure, there are worse places. Cairo comes to mind. But this idea that we just have to warehouse people to keep them from having massive sprawling impact on the planet is absolutely the most wrong way to think about it, IMO. I hate when people argue that if we just tighten our belts and accept a lower standard of living, everyone can be accommodated with low environmental impact. I go the other way: if there were few enough people (and hoarding/profiteering was curtailed), beachfront and slopeside real estate would be cheap.
Did I miss something? You said it is a “shitty” argument, but you never state what is wrong with it.
Not me, but I think that the fundamental argument is quality / quantity.
The quantity side aligns with capitalism and growth for the sake of growth. More consumers. More labor. Supporting the top-heavy aging populace (admittedly a problem) by whatever means necessary. Quantity is an argument favoring people not yet born, or favoring a pyramid scheme by which there needs to be an ever-expanding base of young, productive people to support the old. Nonexistent people’s “wants” should not be considered in any way. If they are not born, they can not suffer. We should not consider what hypothetical people might have wanted. The elderly need to be supported, but by some other means. We cannot continue growth forever simply to support all those who came before us.
The quality side is benefit for the existing populace. As a person who exists, it’s basically the only thing I care about. I prefer my quality of life over sacrifice for the potential existence of not-yet-existent lives. I think any sane person would want there to be more quality of life for themselves and other people living. Quantity of life directly impedes this goal.
The previous poster may not have stated the case as such, but I believe that it is self-evident.
You people, I swear. I said specifically that I’m not arguing for increased population and yet your whole response is structured like that’s exactly what I said we should do. Do you even read what you respond to or do you just scan until you find the right key word to launch into a rant?
Well if we could make everyone have a good quality of life and not destroy the environment and at the same time have more people to enjoy life and to help drive innovation and art, it would generally be for the better.
I don’t think you comprehend exactly how large a number 7 billion actually is. There’s plenty of innovation and art potential already.
Currently a good portion of those people are barely surviving and don’t have bandwidth for art or effective innovation. But that’s not really the point. If people are happy and have a good quality of life, and there’s no negatives, then more is better because it’s more happiness.
I’m not arguing against concentration of wealth and hoarding by the ultra-rich, which is obviously a problem, but I have said recently: everyone could live like a modern-day billionaire if there were fewer people.
Too often the argument pivots the other way and turns into: if we all eat plants, live in ultradense cities with dystopian warehousing of people, and nobody has a car, we could be in ecological harmony with 8B+ people. I don’t like that angle.
If “Westerners”, or “the global North”, or “developed countries” are consuming more than “our fair share” of resources while some significant fraction of the 8B+ humans are in poverty, that’s not ideal. On the other hand I want my standard of living to increase, not decrease, and I find making concessions a hard sell.
But think about the profits! We need more people to exploit, if there aren’t enough people to replace those who demand disgusting things like “actual living wages” with ones that are just happy to get any job at all, where do you think we’ll end up?? We’d have to actually value workers, no, human life itself, instead of just pretending to do so while treating them all as replaceable as they are! And, most importantly, this would hurt my bottom line! I need a new yacht this year, ok? You just don’t understand how important my wants truly are, ok?? So stop spreading such nonsense! ~ Pretty much every CEO out there, probably
I don’t owe the future anything.
I don’t give a fuck if our species survives. Why should I?
Everything ends someday.
The issue is we don’t just go straight from point A to B, rather there’s a long period of suffering.
Well for one, I hope you don’t plan to take out any form of retirement or invest in the stock market, including via index funds, because that’s leeching off the productivity of young people in the future.
It’s immoral to leech off other people’s children tax money, sure.
But also no one wants to be a sucker doing 20+ years of unpaid labor raising kids, so someone else 's S&P 500 keeps growing and sustains a very comfortable retirement plan, and no one will even help you with raising kids anymore.
It’s really the system’s fault, not individuals. It makes it lucrative for every individual human to give as little back, and take as much from everyone else.
