Like, they are bad for societies though. Not just in terms of keeping them around but also in terms of demographic makeup, no? Children are an important part of the social fabric. There is a point at which the old outnumbering the young does bevome a bad thing.
Yes, but our consumer society isn’t raising the alarm for those reasons (for the most part)
Why though? Those statements might or might not be true, but they’re totally unqualified.
My mind goes to this video.
that is why countries wont even dare discuss why its occuring instead trying to low effort coerce people into having more children.
Trap people in a work - consume - die paradigm
People refuse to bring new life into the hellscape you created
Cry about it in your propaganda channels
The so-called birthrate crisis is manufactured by morons like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk who clearly didn’t pay attention in science class and didn’t learn about logistic population growth https://www.britannica.com/science/population-ecology/Logistic-population-growth and those who see a line going down and assume it will keep going down at the same rate forever.
Birthstriking is the biggest middle finger one can possibly give to capitalism and to the corrupt establishment that enforces it through violence. It is the strongest action available to the average person, a direct vote against the future that we are headed towards.
They know this, which is why they are freaking out with tons of propaganda, attacks on education, and erosion of women’s rights.
Birth rates below replacement level do present some actual challenges to society. But instead of trying to actually address these issues, they are going for the band-aid of increasing birth rates.
They only care about birth rate so that labor is devalued.
Historians argue that one of the contributing factor to the end of feudalism was the black death, because the laborers left had more bargaining power then before over the nobles/clergy to make demands like tenancy, humanistic values etc.
But the moment where AI is able to replace whole industries is when these sob stories will vanish, and in good conscience, who can have a kid when those are their prospects?
This isn’t like the industrial revolution where people were just upskilled and shifted into other domains, there’s only so many hospitality and service oriented jobs which can support the labor force writ large.
Actually would be nice if worker pop drops so hard the value of workers goes up.
In Europe after the Black Plague the value of peasants increased significantly contributing to social and economic reforms. Lower birth rates can accomplish the same feat with less suffering.
Excellent point. Kinder to the plant, too.
That’s what im thinking they are really afraid of.
Hence the agenda of the current American regime. Outlaw birth control. Eliminate public education. Health care will be too expensive for most workers. And over it all, evangelical Christianity keeps a poorly educated workforce in line. So you end up with a working class who breed fast, die young, and have no concept that life could be any other way.
The word “for” does a lot of heavy lifting in there.
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.
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.
The only problem being, that while nice in theory, socialist economies never actually did that in practice. Since humanity has never figured out, how to actually do economic planning in some centralized or semi-centralized way without being very inefficient and corrupt. I used to think AI could do that one day, but I guess that was too optimistic…
It’s easy to see capitalism is terrible. It’s hard to see a better system, that could replace it.
I don’t think that’s true.
Central planning ran the USSR and its satellites for some 40-70 years. They didn’t even have computes for the majority of this period and many of these economies experienced high rates of growth. If I remember correctly, the USSR speedran economic development so that the GDP per cap of the USSR increased 10 times between the beginning and the end of the experiment. The US grew about 3 times during the same period while being the main world hegemon, profiting from the vast majority of the world. Of course there were problems, like the famines in the 30s, but they didn’t repeat post-WWII. It’s not like capitalism hasn’t caused famines around the world either. So despite the standard criticism, I don’t think planning did poorly overall.
China is also demonstrating how long term central economic planning allows to build an economy efficiently, with a long term focus and avoiding most crises capitalist economies experience on regular basis. They’re clearly leading in development of solutions to climate change in a way that is above and beyond any other economy, in solar, wind, battery and EV production. Just earlier this month we saw their emissions fall despite higher electricity usage for the first time. And they’re powering a lot of everyone else’s renewables transition. Then on the ageing front, they’re already doing a lot of manufacturing automation. I read they’re also doing farming automation now. Apparently DJI’s other job is spraying fleets for example. I don’t know much about healthcare and elder care but I imagine they’re either working on reducing labour needs or planning on it. So yeah, while we’re afraid of automation because we know we’ll be left jobless and/or deskilled by the capital owners (even if it eventually leads to a crisis), them socialist fkers don’t have that problem. The more they automate, the less population they need to maintain and grow their standard living, the cheaper they can manufacture what they make, the easier the ageing population problem becomes. Given how many universities they’re opening each year, growing the highly skilled research labour share, I think they’re only going to accelerate these trends.
One more thing about planning - the largest capitalist corporations that deal with actual physical production and large supply chains already do the type of planning that’s been done in past and present socialist states. In fact it’s probably larger and more complex than some whole countries. A common example is Walmart. You’ll find little market forces within its operation. In fact companies like this, that have complex enough products and/or supply chains do everything they can to isolate themselves from the free market in order to decrease uncertainty, therefore increase the likelihood of successfully producing and delivering the product, and of course maximize their profits. If you consider how every major sector of the economy is getting consolidated through competition into a monopoly or oligopoly, and similar economic planning process goes on in most of those, you could perhaps see how capitalism itself trends towards central planning. Of course for profit maximization and not social benefit.
First of all, it is hilarious that as part of criticizing capitalism, you use economic growth as a metric instead of let’s say availability of goods in stores. Yes, if your economy revolves around state directed things like building weapons, infrastructure and growing industry, it gets easier to manage than unpredictable consumer demands.
China started it’s explosive growth when they relaxed their central control. I am not advocating some absolute libertarian market freedom either. Yes, state exerting control, ideally with consumer interests in mind, can be a good thing to avoid the pitfalls of “pure” capitalism. But there are also risks to that, see China overbuilding high speed rail and housing.
And finally, isn’t Walmart the poster example of decentralized planning? It does the “planning” at the level of store selling final goods, where there is best access to data, such as shopping habits and trends. That’s the point of decentralized planning, not having unreliable ad-hoc supply chains.
PS: To be clear, you also have many good points. I addressed only the ones I disagreed with.
Economic growth is just easy to check data. Many people are completely unaware even of that. Not saying you specifically are. If one’s interested beyond that, could look into other indicators such as education, life expectancy, etc.
China’s relaxed some sectors and not others depending on their importance and the competency within.
Generally markets and competition do well in figuring out how to do something we don’t know how to do well and cheap. Once we figure that out for some product or category, profits fall competitors fail and consolidation sets in, cost of production falls further due to decreasing duplication and increased scale. At that stage, you have to re-establish control or the monopoly begins draining resources from the economy by raising prices. I think this is what China’s doing. They do a high level plan on what they want to develop, get their centrally controlled bits needed in place, e.g. capital from banks, raw resources for batteries, then let existing or new companies enter a competitive market to develop the thing. We saw this occur with EVs. I don’t think they’ve reached the consolidation point yet.
A sector that hasn’t been relaxed for example is banking and for a good reason.
But beyond relaxing control, the other very important thing that was relaxed was foreign direct investment. Getting factories built in sectors you don’t have by foreign firms, almost always as joint ventures with the clearly stated goal of knowledge transfer. Personally I think this is likely a bigger contributor to their economic explosion than planning changes although it also requires planning changes itself.
On Walmart, I think what you’re looking at is the feedback mechanism of shop/factory data going up the stack. A Walmart store has no capability of doing the planning needed to get a requested amount of a certain good on its shelves, beyond requesting it from Walmart HQ. Walmart HQ computes and directs everything from telling how many thousand plastic trays a factory in China should make, to eventually getting the 50 requested by a store in Bumfuck Nowhere delivered. Data feedback mechanisms exist in every operation of meaningful complexity. They existed in the USSR, they exist in China, they exist in every corporation I’ve worked in, currently automotive. Every large corporation takes data from its operations, either through people or directly from processes, or both, or from their products themselves, computes projections, decides what to make more of, less of, what program to cancel or start, what input resources to get more or less of, how many people to hire or fire, all in order to support the desired new projection. Then they turn that into their expected growth numbers for the next quarter and spit it out during their investors call.
Economic growth is just easy to check data.
That’s debatable but ok.
Generally markets and competition do well in figuring out how to do something we don’t know how to do well and cheap. Once we figure that out for some product or category, profits fall competitors fail and consolidation sets in, cost of production falls further due to decreasing duplication and increased scale.
Absolutely yes.
A sector that hasn’t been relaxed for example is banking and for a good reason.
Yes, very good reason.
But beyond relaxing control, the other very important thing that was relaxed was foreign direct investment.
So the other big part of capitalism.
On Walmart, I think what you’re looking at is the feedback mechanism of shop/factory data going up the stack.
I think this comes back to what you said before. If we are talking about established items, that you already have suppliers for, then you can centralize it.
But good luck getting beer from a small local brewery stocked. The more centralized, the less flexible and innovative.
Imo if you centralize on a scale of an entire national economy, you would have very hard time dealing with anything that’s not a well established supply line already.
The thing is, you don’t have to centralize the entire economy in order to be positioned to solve for the difficult problems facing us. But I think having a robust long-term looking economic planning in the sectors everything else rests upon, like energy, natural resources, transportation, logistics, education, care, housing, banking, finance, basic research, defense, food, electronics components, chips etc. itself produces small firms that can do new things much easier due to the availability of materials, equipment, capital and labour at low costs. This doesn’t mean that for example every chip made would have to be planned by someone in the capital. Nothing of the short. It means that the planner says, we need to have the designs and ability to mass produce low cost, high performance RISC-V cores for PCB integration by 2025. Then Huawei and SMIC get their shit together and assemble teams to do this. If they need more capital they get it. If there’s someone who wants to start working on a design with a new team, there’s going to be capital available for a startup. Once the core is in production, that core becomes an input for other large and small firms, or individuals who want to do something with a low cost processor in it that now have a viable path to form new firms. This is why there are a shit ton of small Chinese firms making innovative consumer items. This is why US firms keep explaining how they can’t possibly make this or that product in the US in the context of tariffs. When everyone downstream from them is profit maximizing, their inputs become prohibitively expensive. Someone was talking about how much it would cost to source a small neodymium magnet motor for a consumer pump made in the states and said it’s so expensive that it’s only viable for defense, aerospace and such. And then the neodymium still comes from China.
The consumer parts of the economy where you have smaller firms with interesting products often sits at the tip of the existing supply chains and infrastructure. Perhaps use them differently. That’s also true for local breweries as they rarely grow their hops, wheat or build their own equipment from bare metal, or mine the metal.
But even in the consumer sector here (Canada), most of the aisles in our grocery stores are filled by the products of a handful of companies. PepsiCo, Coca-Cola, Unilever, Colgate-Palmolive, Kraft, Nestle, Kellogg’s, Danone, Mars, Mondelez and the store brand. Then you have Big Ag product filling the produce and meat section from the usual suspects. Outside of who provides these firms with direction and who collects their profits, they’re what state-owned enterprises look like.
It means that the planner says, we need to have the designs and ability to mass produce low cost, high performance RISC-V cores for PCB integration by 2025.
But this is the hard part. Who is qualified to say that RISC-V is the way to go instead of x86? An elected politician? Experts? If experts, how do you select them? Who checks they really are experts? Who holds them accountable?
If there’s someone who wants to start working on a design with a new team, there’s going to be capital available for a startup.
Who and how decides if a startup is worthy of funding? How do you prevent ideas being rejected for personal reasons, e.g. religious objection? How do you prevent fraudulent startups?
If they need more capital they get it.
Who and how decides when it is no longer worth it? How do you avoid fraud, wastefulness, etc.?
Since humanity has never figured out, how to actually do economic planning in some centralized or semi-centralized way without being very inefficient and corrupt. I used to think AI could do that one day, but I guess that was too optimistic…
The big national retailers already operate as central planners.
isn’t Walmart the poster example of decentralized planning? It does the “planning” at the level of store selling final goods, where there is best access to data, such as shopping habits and trends. That’s the point of decentralized planning, not having unreliable ad-hoc supply chains.
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Wish I could upvote your comment more than once. Clear as it can be. 👌🏼
I tried making it as concise as possible while preserving the main bits needed to follow the logical arguments and using as little jargon as possible. I’m glad you appreciate it! ☺️
Low birth rates are problematic to carcinogenic ideologies.
Positioning the increase in population as a core tenet for a system condemns it to resource exhaustion.
I’m all for providing the option to ‘procreate’ where it’s appropriate and non-coercive, but demanding it as a requirement for acceptable incorporation into society should always be disparaged and ridiculed.
Yeah depends on what scale you’re looking at. Worldwide it’s still poor, religious conservative people who still have lots of children. If the scales tip far enough I could mean humanity will regress for several generations because these religious conservative people have become the majority and will put fascists and dictators into power.
You mean… Like the ones the US put into power last year?
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.
“you’re not producing enough capital batteries”
My condo building just got rid of the company that meters our water. After years of this we could finally break the contract.
My water bill usage was something like $15/mo and they had an admin fee of $13/mo. In a building of like 150 apartments, those guys were raking in like $2k a month from us for keeping their automated shit plugged in.
The managers said they would just stop metering and our monthly fees would pay the bill. After a year, they would adjust our monthly rates to balance it out.
They never had to balance it out - that’s how little the overall water usage cost was.
People understand the concept of, “no infinite growth on a finite planet,” but then refuse to accept that that holds true for us as well. The world population has more than doubled in my lifetime. Obviously we can’t do that forever. Especially in the context of a climate crisis that is making less land livable over time. For completely practical reasons we are going to have to set up some kind of system that can function in equilibrium rather than requiring growth.
This is true but people focus so hard on the population they miss the wider issue. Its not the number of people thats the issue right now, its the massively uneccesary amount of resources each person uses.
The world can accomodate a lot of people IF we shift the way we do things. If we all live like the world is an endless piggy bank, it wont work.
Without considering the way we live and the system we’ve built, people begin sliding into borderline eco-fascist ideas of population control because its an easy thing to understand and latch onto. But the situation is much more complicated than that.
So yes, there is a finite human population limit but that doesnt mean we’ve hit it or are even going to hit it.
Its not the number of people thats the issue right now, its the massively uneccesary amount of resources each person uses.
so your proposal is to increase the population count, but decrease how much each person has available as resources? Essentially just throwing a lot of people into poverty?
No. And you either know that and are strawmanning or are brainwashed into thinking excessive resource use equates to wellbeing.
well if you think excessive resource use has nothing to do with wellbeing, i’d happily take your excessive resources from you :)
Ok so you have no counter argument. Got it.
There is a MASSIVE middle ground between overconsumption and excess consumerism, and actual poverty.
Pretending that any amount of scaling back consumption inevitably leads to mass poverty is intellectually dishonest, or just genuinely stupid.
Which are you?
hey man, why would you respond inflammatorily like this? can’t we just discuss things in good faith?
maybe i’m a bit heated about this topic, but that is solely because i think it’s really important for humanity’s wellbeing that the statement that “we need more people” doesn’t prevail. But i recognize i can’t explain that to you’all properly.
Nobody said ‘we need more people’. Your failure to comprehend an argument is not our responsibility.
if you get heated you should take a break, come back later, and re-read the thing you’re responding to. otherwise you may misinterpret people’s intent. your response doesn’t match what they said.
but decrease how much each person has available as resources? Essentially just throwing a lot of people into poverty?
That is not implied. Especially if we consider that the resources we waste are through supply chains rather than our own direct use. If my electrical supply comes from from a more efficient source, then my usage can be less wasteful and potentially cheaper. If my city continues to improve public transport, I can actually save money and use less resources in daily transit. Products we consume have serious potential to conserve resources at a mass scale, and often it even saves them money due to paying less for resources needed in production. A lot of waste also comes from overproduction, think of those Dunkin’ Donuts end-of-day-disposal videos. We make far more than we need in so many areas.
Furthermore, the most wasteful people are a minority of the mega-rich. You and I probably don’t need to cut down much on jet fuel costs. People close to poverty usually aren’t (directly) wasteful, hell, some of them actually reduce waste through dumpster-diving and recycling schemes.
It’s not about decreasing how much each person has - quite the opposite, actually. It’s about increasing the efficiency of how we distribute our resources so that more gets to those who need it because we already have far more than we need but most of it is wasted or artificially made scarce to increase profit.
The US throws away something like 60% of the food we produce annually while kids starve and politicians talk about getting rid of free lunches at schools.
The “overpopulation” fear is really just misdirection from the greedy few to keep the rest of us from questioning why we let them get away with everything.
function in equilibrium rather than requiring growth.
Not only that, a system that can adapt to changes where the equilibrium might shift over time. We have a lot of work to do to undo the climate crisis, if we even can, and if not, we’ll be living in a geologically different planet when we do.
World population will reach a maximum of 9 million and then slowly decline as birth rates have fallen massively everywhere. However, in some countries the birth rate has fallen so much that it will be a huge problem. In those countries young people will have almost no peers while growing up, and in the context of Democracy old people will have a majority. See the Kurzgesagt video for what live will be like in South Korea: https://youtu.be/Ufmu1WD2TSk
