Sounds catchy, but I’m not sure this is really true. Capitalism is about owning things, not selling things.
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.
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.
Unless you expect people to work until they drop dead it’s a crisis regardless of the economic system, especially coupled with the increases in life expectancy. You have fewer and fewer people of working age who have to provide for and take care of more and more old people for longer and longer. Even if you eliminate profit motives, you’re placing an outsized burden on younger generations.
You think raising kids is free? The cost to raise a child including college is more expensive than end of life care for elderly.
($27k/ year California plus $14k/year for public school for a total of $41k per year for ages 5-18. Then college which is even more expensive.) That’s a minimum of $800k.
That compares to $150k of full medical care for last 3 years for elderly. Before that they are self sufficient and have minimal costs.
https://bmcpalliatcare.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12904-023-01197-2
And when elderly die, they free up resources for the next generation.
Self sufficient? So youre saying they grow their own food and repair all their own homes?
It’s a simple problem of not enough laborers to provide all the menial everyday ressources people want/need, while a growing number of people is retired and still consumes these things. We’re technologically advanced enough that it won’t cause us to starve, but fewer people making things when the same amount of people consumes things will always lead to lower quality of life if technology doesn’t offset it by automating labor.
Capitalism is merely the cruelest system at this, since it will always fuck over the vulnerable first. Under capitalism it’s a problem for old people and everyone whose elderly parents are still alive, under a fairer system it would equally affect everyone, but to a lesser degree.
Money is a representation of the labor. Do children grow their own food? Do you?
Yes. But the elderly get that money from past labor. Which does not contribute in the present. The entire system of retirement is built on the assumption that you work for more than 1 person until retirement to provide for the elderly (and well, also to provide for children) so that then, once you are retired yourself, the next generation will provide for you.
There being fewer children does feather the effects a little though.
As technology improves to reduce workforce needed, it frees up more people to enter elder care workforce.
So things can still balance out.
Yea but that cuts into corporate profits soooooo why not force a population of people to turn out babies like the good old days!
How many people work in health care now? How many people are under/unemployed? How long will elderly live?
Do you see how this isn’t a crisis for anyone but the rich?
You did nothing to explain how it’s not a crisis for the poor.
You’re looking at it purely from a present-day perspective. Just because the pool of available workers is large enough today to provide for everybody doesn’t mean that it will be fifty years into the future. It’s not about “infinite growth” it’s about providing a consistent standard of living and a fair generational contract that doesn’t place an undue burden on future generations.
Well, there’s a simple fix. Since 1970, the standard of living for 90% of the population in the US has been stagnant or declining. We have absolutely increased our GDP, our productivity, and our total economic output. But all the gains have gone to the top 10%. You could tax all economic growth past the 1970 level at 100%, and 90% of the country wouldn’t even notice.
The notion that a decreasing population is a capitalism issue is straight childish. First-world demographics are going top heavy fast. And for all the cries that, “They just want more workers!”, I say, yes, that would be the point.
The more advanced a society is the larger the population needed just to keep people fed and housed, regardless of the system.
This is why agriculture was a trap. It let us have more people which led to needing more people to support the population.
You made the case for the inverse - agriculture had many more kids while technological advances are leading to fewer over time
I’m saying that there’s a minimum viable population for a technological society like ours and if we have too few people working it’s going to collapse.
Maybe it should collapse. Survival of the fittest applies just as well to societies and economic systems. If capitalism is so comically dysfunctional that it cannot even provide people enough that they feel comfortable having kids…when reproduction is the most natural, biologically fundamental thing in the world? Yeah, that is clearly a sick and depraved system that doesn’t deserve to continue to exist on this Earth. Let it fall.
expect people to work until they drop dead
that’s literally the direction we’re going, regardless of birthrate. yes, it is a crisis. france rioted over this. we just shrugged and said meh, cross that bridge something something
Ideally social security, Medicaid and Medicare should’ve been implemented as individual accounts. You get what you pay for with an extra amount being collected for disability insurance. Politically impractical but mathematically solves the problem of fluctuating population numbers.
That wouldn’t help. Retirement accounts are just as affected by population pyramids as state social welfare systems. They’re just obfuscated.
It’s going to happen eventually whether you like it or not. The harm has already been done, do not delay the consequences.
I said it before and I’ll say it again …
It’s not about the quantity of life
It’s about the quality of life
If you make the world a capitalistic hell hole where people are constantly worked to the bone without much reward and no time to enjoy their lives, then chances are, they won’t be motivated or even healthy enough to want to have children. In the premodern wild, people had many children because they had time and they knew that conditions had the possibility of improving in the future. Sure, many of their children died but they knew that the ones who did survive would have a chance to survive if they worked hard enough because they knew their work would be rewarded.
In our current world … you can work until your hands fall off and you won’t be rewarded. More and more people are realizing that they don’t want that for themselves so why should they do that to their unborn children?
The conditions for humanity are falling everywhere and people are so compassionate for their children that many of them feel like they don’t want to bring their children into this hell hole we’ve created if 99.99% of everyone has no chance at a good life.
Capitalism is all about using other people so that YOU can have an amazing quality of life. And even if you’re at the lower end of the economy in the US or Europe, your standard of living is propped up by third world labor, so really I strongly doubt that anyone here is in a position to say they’d be better off without capitalism. Most of the world, yes. Smartphone owning westerners: get real, colonizers.
This assumes that said smartphones can only feasibly be created the way they currently are, and no other way. Can you genuinely not imagine minerals being mined, electronics assembled, by well paid workers?
Thats not to say the current absurd rate would still be sustainable in such conditions, but i don’t think you can definitively say that losing capitalism would inevitably mean a decrease in living standards. A well managed transition to socialism could maintain much of our luxuries.
Where did I say most phones can never be fairly or sustainably produced? It’s almost like you’re replying to the wrong comment, because I never said I can’t imagine miners being well paid.
I happen to agree with the points you made. I was just describing the current conditions. I think that people at the lower end of the American economy believe they’re getting screwed by capitalism, when they don’t actually know what screwed is, or how they too are complicit in the same exploitation they cry out against, just with invisible foreign workers.
If we’re going to move beyond capitalism, we need to understand what we stand to gain and lose. I don’t think most do.
You implied that westerners would be much worse off without capitalism, and specifically referred to smartphones, seemed clear to me
Capitalism as we have it absolutely favors westerners. Yes I’m saying that. How does that imply that I don’t think phones can ever be produced sustainably/fairly? Please explain the words you’re putting in my mouth.
Didn’t i just explain to you my thought process? I’m not putting words in your mouth, it just seemed that’s what you were getting at. Otherwise the smartphone reference seems totally random
Didn’t i just explain to you my thought process?
Insufficiently, I guess because I did not follow.
Smartphones are made with cheap third world labor. Everyone in the US has one, even those of us supposedly getting so exploited by capitalism. Therefore, the smartphone is like a membership card in the “capitalist exploiters” club. Which I was saying we all belong to.
Availability of education and basic needs is inversely proportional to birthrates.
You’re forgetting another portion of the calculation: amount of resources, and resource generation rate.
Take food for example. We have, and create, far more food than is needed. If that rate continues, we can theoretically keep pumping out people until the birth rates and food generation rates converge.
The actual problem, as it stands currently, is not the amount of resources, or how quickly we can create them: the problem is how they are distributed.
Food, water, shelter, safety. Those are the basic needs. I didn’t forget. But yes, distribution is the main cause of food scarcity.
Availability of education and basic needs is inversely proportional to birthrates.
This is a lie. It’s a lie promulgated by wealthy interests to fight against economic redistribution. You can only reach the conclusion that wealth has no impact on birth rate by making inappropriate comparisons between countries. But when you look within countries, the true relationship is revealed.
There is no relationship between wealth and number of kids…until you reach an income level of $300k or so. Then, there is a very strong correlation. It makes sense. In the US, that’s about the level of income you need to really be insulated from the worst aspects of the US’s economic system. At that point, you can afford to send your kids to a decent school. You don’t have to worry about going bankrupt from health care costs. You can likely afford to have a parent stay home if necessary. At that income level, you’re able to simply purchase the level of stability that would come with a proper social safety net. And once people have some stability and security, they start having kids.
It also takes knowing stopping births is possible and having the access to it. In lthe midst of the worst atrocities in human history we have still had sex. Slaves in the American south still had children in conditions that vastly outstrip anything else in modern capitalism. Native Americans still had children as disease killed 90% of their population. As long as there is enough food to keep survivors healthy enough to concieve and carry to term we have always had children. Because we always seek comfort from one another and sometimes that’s sexual.
Now we have the opportunity to get that comfort without bringing in the child and we do.
Since our economic systems are built to be a pyramid scheme it’ll hurt back for a generation or two but the ecological benefits will quickly outweigh the economic issues.
That’s the same logic Trump uses for the tariffs
You lost me at Trump using logic.
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
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.
Nobody said ‘we need more people’. Your failure to comprehend an argument is not our responsibility.
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?
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.
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.
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.
capitalism: fuck the world up and then panic when people give up on life
I’ll believe it when I see it. Someone has to maintain the buildings and people as they age. Without people you don’t have a society. Norms break down, culture breaks down and then some other group will come in to fill the void.
Looks around, fuck your society and your shitty fast food, gas station, Amazon Warehouse buildings.
If you look at the world through gray shaded glasses, you might think the world to be dull.
If you look upon reality and then deny the truth you will only decive a fool who dooms everyone.
Who’s truth?
Dumb ass comments like this is why we have trump as a president twice. Just keep playing the game it should end up great for a few.
For each one of you, there are 1.2 people on the other side of the aisle who think they’re just as right as you think you are.
If you want to reach them, may I suggest you try honey rather than vinegar.
Honey has the added bonus of converting to mead. Vinegar does not.
Lol yeah if the Democrats would just lean a little more conservative, they would have won the election absolute 🤡.
“Have you ever thought about just kissing the asses of people who want to subjugate you? That really would make it easier for them if you just roll over.” - You. That’s what you sound like.
We’ve seen it over and over throughout history and it’s always been positive. The Black plague. Most recently WW2 depopulated the West of the most able bodied workers. The result wasn’t a collapse but a boom. Those remaining had cheap housing and were paid more for their labor because there were fewer workers.
When population declines enough that everyone has resources, population will go back up again.
I’m not sure that we should celebrate the deaths of millions as a boon to society. I Imagine all the beautiful contributions to the arts, innovations and society that we missed out on.
Nobody said to celebrate, just that we should learn from history.
If we could recreate the effects (higher wages, lower living costs) without the cause (millions dead), maybe we could reap the same benefits.
Births are not a problem we aren’t “too many” we not overpopulated we are destroying resources without thinking how they get back into nature. Thia is not a thanos solution if we are half as many but still doing the same shit nothing will change.
This is deeply myopic. The problem is not low birth rates, but uneven demographics.
How does, let’s say, marxism leninism deal with the problem of uneven demographic distribution? I’ve never heard of any even theoretical fixes from them for that.
https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/CHN/china/birth-rate – do you think China doesn’t view this as a problem?
I’ve never heard of theoretical fixes either but proper Maxism-Leninism has a focus on central planning, doesn’t it? They would certainly see it as a problem and surely consider potential solutions. At least one that acts in good faith of their main premise.
This is deeply myopic. The problem is not low birth rates, but uneven demographics.
At this point i just need to point out that earlier centuries had a very uneven demographic as well. In 1850, people typically had 6 kids on average, which means you had a lot of people too young to work and therefore not part of the workforce. Yet society thrived.
people too young to work
I think it’s possible that you might confused how young that meant in 1850.
They did handle that by … Forcing kids to work. (Harshest example would be chimney sweepers)
Not like we don’t do that now, forcing some kid to make our clothes so we cam buy it cheaper then f****** food.
Point is, “too young” population is not the issue.
Define “even”
How does Marxist leninism deal with this uniquely capitalist problem? I wonder how the factory owners under communism will make a profit under these conditions?
Silly
You have missed the point in spectacular fashion.
The issue isn’t who will work in the factories, it’s who will support the elderly population if there are so few people working. In any society, the old are supported by the young.
Except we do have ai and robots now. This isn’t every other generation in history, we are dealing with gigantic changes. That said, we need better standards about when to end lives. Everyone shouldn’t be kept alive forever. It’s not healthy or natural. My grandparents all died in nursing homes at like 100. Their quality of life was shit. That’s not how to deal with the problem of aging.
That issue is trivial to solve. We simply stop wasting so much labor. Labor has been cheap for a long time. That’s resulted in companies using it very inefficiently. Think of all those office workers that lose half their day to pointless unproductive meetings that could have been an email. Companies can only exist with such comically inefficient practices because labor is cheap.
Higher labor costs will encourage them to use labor more efficiently. The total economic output need not decrease. There will still be plenty of resources available to take care of the elderly. We’ll just stop wasting so much labor.
It’s more a uniquely hierarchical problem than a uniquely capitalist problem. Any hierarchy is made more powerful by having more people at the lower levels, so any long-lived hierarchical social system is likely to run itself into a population cliff at some point. So, as some forms of communism embrace hierarchy, some forms of communism are susceptible to this issue too.
I can get behind that
I think you’re missing some essential point of basic economics if you think this problem doesn’t affect communist societies. I specifically mean the problem of demographic imbalance, not the problem of “infinite growth” which communism does at least try to solve, and free-market capitalism doesn’t actually view as a problem really.
If I understand what you said, then it is still a problem caused by capitalism. Because we have the knowledge and technology to live comfortably with a lot less manpower then 300 years ago. And yea we can go into details, but the difference between an ox and a tractor is huuuuge.
Because we have the knowledge and technology to live comfortably with a lot less manpower then 300 years ago
That’s human nature, not capitalism. People get used to comforts. People don’t like sharing what they see as theirs. This has nothing to do with private ownership of industrial equipment, and operating it for profit.
Sure, you can come up with a political / economic system where everything is divided up evenly. But, that goes against everything we know about human nature. People are selfish. They might be willing to share with their immediate family, or maybe even their clan / neighbourhood. But, people don’t tend to sacrifice their comforts so that people on another continent who speak a different language can have a better life.
Look at pre-capitalist societies, were they full of egalitarianism and justice? You can’t blame capitalism for human nature.
It’s not caused by capitalism but exacerbated by it. The ratio of workers to retirees in 1960 was 5.1 to 1, it’s now 2.1 to 1. Sure if capital wasn’t extracting excess value maybe we could be fine at 2.1 to 1 but I doubt we would be at .5 to 1. At some point it becomes an issue
That depends, really. I’m sorry, but these anti capitalism memes always show such over simplified view of the world, this is not how things work.
Take South Korea, for example. The way they are going right now, 50 years from now it might not even exist anymore. Granted, the underlying causes there for the low birth rates have a lot to do with uncontrolled capitalism, but communism won’t save the country from this problem.
You still have a shrinking work force to do the required work, you still have a relatively expanding section of elders that won’t work anymore but requires care instead, being an extra “burden” on the country. Less people will have to do more work over time and it causes a huge list of issues that communism really isn’t going to solve.
The actual solution for South krea would be in tightening laws on their capitalist system, allowing people more time to have children in the first place. Then they need immigrants, and probably quite a few of them. Like Japan, South Korea is rather homogeneous, they’re in for a surprise, I guess.
Either way, just posting these “but of course communism will solve this, communism solves everything” memes is so naive it’s just child level dumb.
Communism hasn’t worked well anywhere, how about some pragmatism and we start hard limiting capitalism instead, which we know does work
Birth rates are so low
The low birth rates aren’t just rampant capitalism though; it’s also SK women having a choice to not get married and have children, combined with a culture that’s almost rabidly misogynistic. If I were a Korean woman, I absolutely would not want to get hitched to a Korean man and have children with him, because I know that it would be very unlikely that I’d treated like a real person or an equal partner. But the culture–much like Japan–seems to prize people that put in horrifically long hours, and even if you fix the cultural misogyny, you’re still stuck with not having much time to spend with your partner.
Being against capitalism =/= supporting communism.
Why do you believe everyone who hates capitalism thinks communism is the only viable alternative?
The meme implies “not capitalism’s is the answer” and you’re not answering OP’s question.
I’m with Phoenix here, this is a fundamental labor/production problem, not an organizational one. Even if wealth and work was magically, perfectly redistributed via some system (take your pick), life would still suck for younger people in SK.
But “not capitalism” is the solution.
A lot of the low birthrate comes from people choosing careers over families. Gee i wonder what system propagates such behaviour?
The word “for” does a lot heavy lifting in there.
It’s a problem that there will be fewer people in the generation below ours to support our generation in our dotage. This problem is the same regardless of your economic model. Fewer people in the working pool and more people sick and elderly is a bad time.
There’s currently 5 million care workers in the US, at a total population of 332 million. Source
That means that even if the birth rates drop really low and we only have 50 million workers in the next generation, it will still be enough to care for the elderly.
However, it might not be enough to fill the last bullshit workplace some company makes up to make yet another dollar into the pockets of the rich.
Old people, even those who rely on care workers directly, also rely on a lot of other types of workers. They need to eat, so some portion of the farmers, agricultural processors, logistics workers, cooks, dishwashers, etc. will need to continue to support the industries that feed people. Then the industries that feed people also rely on their own supply chains: equipment manufacturers and maintainers, electricity and energy, etc.
Simply being alive relies on the work of others. Broadly speaking, we expect there to be a ratio of workers to the broader population, including those who are not working: children, students, disabled, elderly retirees, etc. If the workers stop working, the non-workers won’t be able to live.
If there’s a one-person society, they basically will always need to work at least some to stay alive. If they’re incapacitated from age or injury, that might mean death, no matter how much they’ve accumulated up to that point.
So no, I don’t think this is a uniquely capitalist problem. Non-capitalist societies have dealt with population collapse before, but those tend to impose real danger to the non-working elderly, and not all of them survive the turmoil.
The majority of the hours worked in the US economy are pure pointless waste. The waste rate is so high because labor is cheap. With more expensive labor, companies will have to use it more responsibly.
If you think companies use labor efficiently, you have clearly never worked in a big corporate office.
Solving the labor crisis of aging is trivially simple. The market will simply force companies to be more efficient with labor. And as labor earns higher wages, workers will pay higher payroll taxes and be able to keep the pension system running.
And what causes fewer younger people?
Couples not having children.
What causes couples not to have children?
Well, beyond simply not wanting them: economic insecurity. A more equitable economic system would remove that barrier.
Population collapse is also occurring in communist countries. China additionally scuppered themselves by previously putting taxes on multi-child families to get ahead of overpopulation and in doing so accelerated the collapse of the working population ahead of that in capitalist countries.
You’re not describing a country with a equitable economic system.
That’s the great part the current youth won’t get to be sick and elderly. We’ll just be sick and dead.
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
