Is it even a crisis for capitalism? Modern day capitalism seeks to eliminate workers, the ideal for the capitalist is to make a factory full of robots with like 10 employees that manage and service them. As factory work dies the population stabilizes (it doesn’t shrink, it just stops going up year over year) and the remaining population performs service jobs that can’t be performed by AI/Robots or a select bit of high paying factory jobs where robots cannot yet perform the factory task.
In an even more dystopian outlook the capitalists don’t even want people for service, they likely would want robot and AI service (waiters, barbers, etc) in the long game to eliminate the need for serfs.
At the end of the day the cry about population collapse and declining birthrates only makes sense when you add a desired ethnicity before the term. Example [White] birth rates or [White] population collapse. Elon Musk isn’t worried about the birth rate of Japanese or South Koreans. This whole thing is about racist views on world ethnicity.
Every person born is another potential consumer for [PRODUCT]
Yeah, but it’s cyclical. You need people to buy product, but people need money to buy product. Yeah, the ultra wealthy will have money, but you can get more money from 10 million people buying something for $10 than from 10 people buying something for $100,000.
If you get rid of the jobs then people don’t have money so who will buy [PRODUCT]?
You could have 10 trillion people on the earth, but if you only have 3 billion jobs the issue isn’t population. You could argue that 3 billion jobs support up to 15 billion people, but the issue still isn’t the population at that point, it’s the number of jobs.
the last paragraph is were capitalism fails, and where socialism works. 3 billion jobs can support 15 billion people, but that would mean giving the fruits of that labor to those people who have no jobs. This is distributing the product of the labor force to everyone, so everyone can live, that is socialism. If you say ok, let’s just have 3 billion people, one per job, then you aren’t producing for 15 billion, and now the job pool will shrink accordingly.
So, if/when machines come to a point where one, basic, job creates enough GDP to support a massive amount of people, then you need the populace to own the means of that production.
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 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?
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.
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?
Define “even”
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The word “for” does a lot of heavy lifting in there.
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
that is why countries wont even dare discuss why its occuring instead trying to low effort coerce people into having more children.
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.
Why though? Those statements might or might not be true, but they’re totally unqualified.
My mind goes to this video.
Yes, but our consumer society isn’t raising the alarm for those reasons (for the most part)
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What do we do about the coming unemployment crisis?
If AI replaces a lot of workers, we’ll have too many people in the country. There is no healthy way to rapidly decrease the number of people in the country. A good leader thinks ahead and people stop having kids before the unemployment crisis fully hits.
Support life extension, then both are happy.
It’s not just capitalism though, it’s innovation and the arts. Our development as a species is partly contingent on population, on more chances of finding that genius, more excess capacity that can be devoted to things not obviously profitable. I disagree with the open endedness of your statement, the rate of change.
Given
- we can’t keep growing
- we’re probably beyond sustainable capacity for this planet
I’ll agree with
- we need to slow and stop population growth
- shrinking population would be better
But disagree
- the rate of drop is important - we want to reduce harm, societal stress, conflict
- we want to plateau at some population well into the billions but less than today
Most importantly, fertility trends look like we’re heading for a fairly steep drop in population as the current generations age out and pass. We are heading toward disruption, societal stress, conflict.
It’s unclear how to stabilize the birth rate for that lower plateau, since we’re mature enough to not go back to oppressing women (I hope), but clearly we’re disincenting children and will quite likely regret that in a generation or two, for most developed countries. For the long term future of humanity and our society, we need to start making tweaks now, when they’re just tweaks. Start making it easier to have children. Start helping parents more. Start making it easier to grow up. Look after our future as a species rather than freeload off the personal choices of individuals.
I do compare it with our treatment of climate change. We failed to make small changes when small changes would have been sufficient. The longer we wait, the bigger, more disruptive, more expensive the changes will need to be. We’re bad at looking ahead and setting longe term priorities but need to get better fast
We need financial and quality of life incentives to pump the gas and brakes on babies.
We need to match the death rate with the birth rate and move that disparity super slowly.
Too many geriatrics, worker class gets f’d
With the introduction of automation every decade (currently AI is the big one), unemployment rates will go up so we don’t even need as many working. Our capitalist brains just can’t fathom “handing out” extra resources.
Every automation brought more work, rather than less. Why? Because profit. If the boss owner can get more out of less people, they will fire the unneeded workers, bring prices down and force the competition to either follow or close down
That’s not exactly true though. With excess, we’ve increased the needs and wants of individuals and scaled production to match. We could easily provide the same amount as before with less people, but every generation is leveraging the growth of the previous generation. Once we don’t grow in one generation, we’ll plateau and we won’t be ready for it. It’ll be the social version of an economic recession.
It’s more work because the company continues to operate like before and just piles more into it instead of looking at the overall work and removing things that aren’t necessary, and reorganizing operations/back office.
I’d call that pile on of more work productivity. If you can get 20 blankets a day with automation instead of 20 a month without, and they’re of similar quality, then why wouldn’t you?
Now you put automation in front of a good coder and all the sudden that video game that used to take 5 years to make, only takes a year. Again, all good if you can approach similar quality.
Back 500 years ago, only the wealthiest could afford a fine blanket and it would take ages to produce. Nowadays anyone can purchase one at their preferred store. Automation has increased productivity and thus democratized purchasing power.
There are still billions on this planet that struggle to survive. Billions we could potentially pull out of poverty. Why stop the automation train now when the tracks show that we have further to go?
The question becomes: why are so many people still unable to afford such basic amenities, while a handful of individuals have enough wealth to sustain all of those poors for years?
