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I love this community for some posts where people have serious discussions or stating their mind and other posts with shittalk mayhem
who will work unskilled jobs if there aren’t enough people to do them?
Immigrants usually
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.
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?
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.
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.
The people that want higher birth rates don’t care about higher wages, the environment, or people’s safety.
They just need workers they can milk them until they can’t work anymore. They need these workers to spend all their money so they have to keep working.
They also want to make sure people with a different skill color do not have more babies than them.
I think that’s actually the main reason.
Is skill coloured by the type of skill or by the level of skill?
By rarity.
The endgame of capitalism is slavery.
The early game of capitalism was slavery
Midgame pretty much unions, now mostly a speed bump in the rearview mirror.
Perhaps that should change.
The per capita cost of maintaining existing infrastructure does become a problem, but yeah, a solvable one.
We just never get to retire.
By 2030 it’s projected to be 2.0 workers per retiree.
Seems like it’d be a good place for the last 50 years of gains in efficiency to go.
Time to start taxing the rich instead of worrying about taxing per worker.
Build more housing so that houses are more affordable, bring on the 4 day work week.
Expensive houses just funnels more money into the hands of banks and landlords without providing any benefit to society.
Sounds like everyone shouldn’t have kids then so the kids are not forced to go through the burden of caring for douchebags.
Why did it increase in the 90s and stabilize for a decade?
People forget how much was going right in the 90s, especially in the states. Boomers were in their prime working years (paying into Social Security instead of collecting it), women’s participation in the workforce had hugely expanded, and a decade of strong economic growth and job creation meant more people working, lower unemployment, and more money going into the system. Obviously some of that was demographic luck, but the Clinton economy was actually putting people to work.
What those „retiree per worker“ graphs always fail to mention is how productivity increased over the same period.
Those two workers today produce about as much as 8 did in the 50s so supporting the retirees should in fact be easier today, not harder.
That it isn’t is because wages didn’t increase proportionately.
That it isn’t is because wages didn’t increase proportionately
Yes, because your wages go to said retirees. Who do you think owns all the companies not increasing your wages?
Ya know, I have vague memories of reading an argument somewhere that the black plague killed off so many peasants that the surviving ones had materially less shitty conditions for a little while, due to scarcity and all that.
This is true in places. There are also acounts of places where all the nobility died and the peasants threw weeks long parties.
Great news, we’re bringing the plague back too!
The actual disease caused by pest bacteria is easily treatable nowadays.
Facilitated by such space age concepts as washing your fucking hands and not drinking the corpse-water.
That’s “prevention” you’re talking about, not “treatment”, generally considered better, but still.
You must have missed the news. They’re making a new stronger plague now
:)U mean the one in Russia where one of the researchers recently died?
Specifically, the peasants had more bargaining power for better conditions because the absolute decrease in their number made each of them more valuable to the ruling class as individuals. There was an increase in peasant revolts, and concessions to the peasantry following the black death partly for this reason.
Peasants only got the ability to leave the land they were bound to to seek better employment elsewhere after the black plague.
Yup, labor scarcity meant higher wages and bargaining power.
Okay, but retirement is based off there being more people working than not, so in countries with national pensions we’ll have to significantly raise taxes, and in countries without such a system, retirees who are invested into index funds, need publicly traded corporations to start underpaying their employees even more (it’s really eye-opening when you realize people over 55 own 73% of all the resources of the US, from money to stocks to real estate).
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.
Children live with parents. If retirement becomes burden of your offspring this will have interesting consequences.
Re resource shift: in my country we managed to increase total employment in education while birthrates continue to dwindle
Sounds to me like we’ll have to do a communism, i.e banding together to help each other out more, to allow people to retire in comfort. The horror!
(Just in case it seems like I’m dismissing anything you said, I’m not, and thank you for your analysis. My main takeaway is that it seems an unavoidable problem)
This is not about communism vs capitalism, its about the ratios. If there are 5 old people for every young person then how are we supposed to take care of all the old people? There’s just not enough manpower.
Actually it is a communism vs capitalism thing. The problem arises in both, but the solutions available depend on the system. I reccomend you look up how China is handling its massive elderly population. For example the elderly there have huge public parks and get outside moving and socializing a lot. In big cities it’s common for them to have mid day slow dance meetings in the parks. This is only possible because the government’s priority is not producing profit for billionaires but caring for its people. So it maintains these things and the public transport required to get the elderly there, and the assistance to keep them fed and healthy.
This video is 15 years old: https://youtu.be/SvmV7GRRPq0
When people stay active and a part of their community into their old age instead of sitting in their huge houses alone or in a nursing home they require much less support to keep living.
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.
Another great vid: https://youtu.be/RnCCY2YtVX0
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.
Immigration!
Oh…
Population decline is a global phenomenon. You can’t offset this loss with immigration when the countries people are coming from are also experiencing a population decline. We (in the West) are currently using immigration to offset this loss now, but when the population decline really starts hitting other parts of the globe (as it is projected to do within the next few decades) then that will no longer be a solution.
And this is compounded by people living much longer…
How do nursing homes do it?
Poorly is my understanding
No, it’s about the scale of society and how we support ourselves in retirement, though. See, if retirement funds rely on, as the guy above me says 1. Companies underpaying their employees and 2. Governments taxing a group of more people in the below generations than there are to support in the top - then those are unsustainable sources of retirement comfort.
So what would be sustainable? Well historically, and in some countries today, old people need family to support them into old age. You would need either your own kid, with their own house big enough for you, or a rich little nephew with a house big enough for all you and your siblings to live in while retired.
Or… We just do the decent thing and take care of non-relatives. To ease the load on, say, retirement homes, we’d need to agree across society to bring the old people into communities of younger adults, and those younger adults would need to check on them regularly.
Sice this requires a community binding together, you might call it “communism.” Though it isn’t necessarily Marxism.
isn’t that specifically the government pentions! social security and somewhat less important to those that have personal retirement accounts?
Oh no not rich people having less money.
I feel like this as well.
The right wing family values rural living types seem awfully strange when they are unhappy about the suggestion that we return to 1960s population levels
Eugenics apologia.
100%. Weird that you’re catching downvotes for pointing it out
Who will pay to care for the aging population? Welp, whether you live in a socialised care country or the United hellscapes of America, the answer is: you will. Or your kids will, or whatever generation we’re talking about here.
Even if you do live in the US and have no elderly relatives, the insurance companies will have to hike the shit out of their premiums to remain profitable.
The fewer working age people there are compared to people past working age, the worse it will be.
Yeah but that’s just a pyramid scheme. We can’t just keep growing the human population forever.
Started working at 15, figure I’ll work till I’m 75. Or until I die, whatever. If I can. It’s fine, not ideal but fine. I would have appreciated maternity leave more than retirement. The time then would have been a lot more valuable.
Yep. There’s a big bowl of shit, and some day it must be eaten. The choice becomes: do you eat the shit, or do you add a little squirt and pass it to your kids?
Billionnaires.
you all going to say bullshit about retirement, like if fascist around the globe don’t want to take it from you already, no amount of canon fodders you spawn for billionaires won’t change that
What’s the connection between population decline and tight knit communities and crime? I can’t see any
Big anonymous city is better environment for crime than village of 50 where everyone knows each other by name.
Except in practice living in the city no one ever steals from me and all the folks I know who live in rural areas are like “watch out for methheads, they’ll steal your shit”
Mostly just less anonymity. In a large community, you can remain more-or-less unknown. In a town where everyone knows each other, you’re a known entity whether you like it or not.
One caveat: the rich would rather use violence to force the few people left into menial tasks, than increase wages even a cent.
We are humans and as such we have always adapted. We will adapt again. You can all live in fear re population decline if you like but I’m just getting on with it.
actually quite pragmatic 🤨
