People are disappearing
mark94
Arizona
Turns out, humanity’s biggest issue may be just the opposite. The New York Times tells us that populations are declining and this is our biggest crisis:
“All over the world, countries are confronting population stagnation and a fertility bust, a dizzying reversal unmatched in recorded history that will make first-birthday parties a rarer sight than funerals, and empty homes a common eyesore.
Maternity wards are already shutting down in Italy. Ghost cities are appearing in northeastern China. Universities in South Korea can’t find enough students, and in Germany, hundreds of thousands of properties have been razed, with the land turned into parks.
Like an avalanche, the demographic forces — pushing toward more deaths than births — seem to be expanding and accelerating. Though some countries continue to see their populations grow, especially in Africa, fertility rates are falling nearly everywhere else. Demographers now predict that by the latter half of the century or possibly earlier, the global population will enter a sustained decline for the first time.
A planet with fewer people could ease pressure on resources, slow the destructive impact of climate change and reduce household burdens for women. But the census announcements this month from China and the United States, which showed the slowest rates of population growth in decades for both countries, also point to hard-to-fathom adjustments.”
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predict climate changes?
Here’s a prediction; doge coin will drop to $.25 and then a soft rebound before flattening out in the next month. There’s an article to hang your hat on.
Also, the cost of having even one child is high, and risky seeing as adults can no longer count on stable employment over decades. In another thread, Shailyn brought up the topic of demand for luxury items during hard economic times (i.e. the pandemic). Having children (particularly multiple children) is quickly becoming a luxury endeavor.
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Those us old enough to remember when Japan was certain to be the dominant economic power will recognize the pattern.
The next step, building a middle class economy is difficult, especially for a centrally planned economy. You need an educated work force, sophisticated financial systems, a well established rule of law that protects investment, and a free market economy that allows the invisible hand of economic decision making.
China sorta, kinda, put some of this in place but by maintains ultimate control by the CCP, they are unlikely to truly become a middle class consumer economy. A minority of their urban population is there, but it’s unlikely to spread to the entire country.
Some governments have put in incentives for people to procreate.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_bon…
Personally, whether or not I’m being naive, I have enough faith in people being able to innovate and societies being able to increase productivity per however many people are still around. Even if there isn’t a reversal where people decide they want to procreate en masse again at some point. But in the meantime things like pensions are probably screwed. On the other hand though, for several years there’s been an increase in multigenerational housing, which I think which I think will be a positive way to mitigate concerns with elderly care.
As the population declines, there will be all sorts of incentives to start having babies again. Government will offer financial incentives. Land and housing will be incredibly cheap. Farmland and clean water will be in abundance. Hell, robots will do most of the work, so we’ll have lots of time to procreate.
Technology and population decline will reduce pollution to near zero. Technology will raise living standards. Wide open, natural spaces will expand. It should be a great time to be alive.
There is nothing wrong with a conscious decision to not reproduce at previous levels. The need to have male offspring is no longer a necessity as it was when the world economy was based in agriculture. Many western families have decided to have two or fewer children, and the reasons can be different. In the USA it appears couples are having children later, and that also contributes to fewer children. Couples are realizing the cost of having more children, and they are using a budget rather than a boner to decide how many kids to have.
It’s going to be interesting to see how this effects the global economy going forward. I think consumption will continue to grow, as each individual will consume more, and the waste produced will remain high as well.
Forget Dogecoin. Invest in Nigeria.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSxihhBz…
The growth in population isn’t helping their economies. It actually makes them poorer. Where is the value in a country of people living in huts made of shit, a largely agricultural society, limited intellect, minimal utilities, and very unstable governments?
Except in Africa, where modern medicine is only recently making an impact on the survival rate of children. But, the social attitude there is still in favor of having larger families. Give it a couple of decades (perhaps more) and I think you'll see family sizes in Africa contract as well.
“By the mid 1990s, Ghana was once again experiencing rapid economic growth, thanks to good governance put forward in policies and plans looking to improve the quality of life for Ghanaians.
These gains were boosted in 2007 with the discovery of off-shore oil, and Ghana’s economy was showing signs of bursting at the seams.
In 2019, Ghana was referred to as “the world’s fastest growing economy” with terms such as “skyrocketing” being used to describe its growth.
In just three decades Ghana made a total turnaround and became the world’s fastest growing economy.
The country has also consistently ranked in the top three countries in Africa for freedom of speech and press freedom according to The World Bank.
These successes all stem from good governance and a shift towards sustainable development.”
2nd, there is definitely no shortage of humans on this planet. We somehow adapted to having this many, hopefully we can adapt to there slowly being fewer. It will be challenging for a number of reasons, but continued population growth can only end badly, IMHO.
While it is true that native-borns in the US, UK, Canada and other Western countries are having less kids than previous generations, people are most certainly not disappearing. China, India and many countries in Africa have out-of-control overpopulation, and have for decades.
The last few years of mass immigration and the present demographic changes are just the beginning of a well-organized globalist agenda openly discussed in UN documents like Agenda 2030 (easily googled by anyone, they aren't hiding anything) where the goal is to alter the demographic composition of Western countries and bring everyone into a flattened, 3rd-world style global living standard. The benefit to multinational corporations of having cheap labor at their disposal is one of the main reasons why.
The media's role (NYT included) is to shout down anyone who even questions these measures as a racist.
That might currently be true for Africa. It is no longer true for India and China. The distribution of the population by age might result in population growth for a while but the lower fertility rate at child bearing ages will eventually result in a contraction.
The question for people in countries with (currently) 1st-world living standards is whether they should accept the imposition of overpopulation into their communities which led to 3rd-world living standards in other places.
The United States became a successful and thriving nation not just because of numbers, but because of the culture, values, work ethic and character of its native population. Immigrants came in and assimilated into this successful culture in the 20th century and things moved forward. If, however, the existing culture, values and work ethic are destroyed via mass immigration (without an expectation of assimilation) and cultural marxism, can one really expect the country to continue to thrive as it previously did?
They may understand the biological clock but seem to struggle (and are not told) the timing needed to meet marry and have pups.
Add on a greater than 50% chance of being divorced with 70% of divorces being initiated by women makes having kids a very bad bet for men
That's a big driver for the decrease in population growth in the developing world, lowering rates of infant mortality and general increasing in expected life spans.
What is so wrong with the lower rates of population growth? I am aware of economists showing how it limits economic growth, but really why are we so focused on everything having to grow all the time? If everything need to keep getting bigger, eventually, that stops working.
Because most elderly support payments and medical programs rely upon tax revenue generated younger working adults. The more working adults there are per retired senior, the less of a strain there is on the system.
Here in the U.S., Medicare is 14% of the U.S. budget and rising fast. Meanwhile, Social Security went inverted from a net annual surplus to deficit in 2010 and it is expected that the fund will be exhausted by 2034, which means either tax increases to keep payments stable, more deficit spending by the U.S. government or benefits cuts.
In order to fund all of this largesse moving forward, we need our ratio of active workers to retirees to be growing, not shrinking. Same holds true in many other advanced nations with generous retirement benefits.
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/…
In 1968, Paul Ehrlich's book “The Population Bomb” warned that the number of people on earth was spiraling out of control. Paul Ehrlich: We were worried then about the problems of feeding human society when there was three and a half billion people on the planet. Now we've got way over seven billion people.
Having driven across the US twice since covid started, I know for certain one thing we have is open space!