How to say you don’t understand sustainability without saying you don’t understand it. :-)
It’ll be fine. The baby boom our grandparents cane from was an anomaly
People live longer. 100 years ago 50 year old man was old.
ok let’s revolt before it’s too late for the planet then?
Oh no, who did this? (sarcasm. a few people have gone out of their way to ensure everyone else’s suffering)
So what’s your alternative? Infinite growth?
Term limits on life.
Limits on wealth.
I don’t owe the future anything.
I don’t give a fuck if our species survives. Why should I?
Everything ends someday.
The issue is we don’t just go straight from point A to B, rather there’s a long period of suffering.
Not just fine, good.
Yes, this IS fine. There’s too many people on this fucking planet. The only reason this is considered a problem is because capitalism and the Bible says so.
No other reason. Period.
Since more people in the world are in China and India you are probably wrong about it being the Bible. It is religious texts that encourage more reproduction for religious spreading to the masses and China just has more landmass so more people overall
While I half agree with you, that’s definitely not the only issue.
Senior citizens become people to take care of, that won’t/can’t work and I don’t mean that in a “dear God consider the GDP” way, but literally just people who will not be contributing but still require services, in fact likely a lot more than normal.
It ends up being a lot of neglected senior citizens dying in horrible ways.
Senior citizens become people to take care of,
Children need more resources to raise than seniors take.
Not with modern lifespans, 75-95 take a ton of care and are unable to contribute
I suppose if you are just thinking about things like cost of formula, diapers, clothes, education. In terms of time spent, children take less and less one on one time as each year passes. They have a finite timeline of required care.
The elderly become less and less independant, the care they require becomes more and more medical in nature, and there is no timeline. Someone with dementia can require around the clock medical care for decades.
Yes, the medical care is 1000x more than cost of food and things.
yes and theres more old poeple than children, thats like, the whole point of the post??
Not even close to true
well 1 out of 23 humans checking to see if random internet claims are true is better odds than i expected, well done sir
If you select North America and slide the slider between 2050 and 2080 it looks like a face opening their mouth and screaming.
Maybe true if you’re comparing 60+ to under 5
1950’s America with that flared base!
Low birth rates are a crisis for capitalism, not humanity. And if you count brown countries, it’s not even happening.
Pension schemes are not a biological imperative.
Not really anything to do with capitalism. If the ratio of workers to non-workers decreases without a proportionate increase in productivity, a higher proportion of workers’ time has to be spent catering to the needs of non-workers. That means less time spent not working and/or less time spent producing unnecessary stuff that improves our lives like chocolate or TV shows.
We grow several times more food than humanity can possibly eat. We don’t have a productivity or resource shortage. We have an allocation error.
I don’t think this is true. I checked the stats for caloric supply and the highest value worldwide is (unsurprisingly) in North America where about 3,500 calories of food are produced per day. That is less than double what a person needs per day, so “several times” seems unlikely.
But I don’t dispute the idea that we produce enough food to feed the world. But I also didn’t say we didn’t.
Could you comment on what I actually said, which is that an ageing population (or any situation in which there are more non-workers per worker) will result in less production being available for people on average?
This is not just about food; it is also about other necessities (such as healthcare) but also non-essentials like entertainment. The problem of an ageing population is not that we’ll starve to death; it’s that our quality of life will decrease.
That’s not what I said. That site measures the output of the chain. I said we grow more food (ie plants) than humanity can eat. We feed the majority of that food to the livestock we keep that absolutely dwarfs the biomass of all wild animals. That introduces a 90%+ caloric inefficiency. If we just ate the plants, we would have to stop growing so much food, even all our industrial processes don’t demand that much. But capitalism demands instead that we keep growing more food than the year before, and so it demands inefficiencies like animal ag. Any scarcity is entirely engineered. It’s not an accident, it’s by design. It is necessary to maximize investor return.
This isn’t just about food, but look at the number of people one farmer could feed 200 years ago (6 or so) vs today (150 or so). We spend a lot of our productive time today doing stuff we didn’t have time for just a couple hundred years ago. We’ve got a long way to fall before we are unable as a species to meet our needs. Proponents of tech advances expect our productivity to increase even if the workforce shrinks. If our standard of living delines on average, either these prognosticators are incorrect or we have a huge allocation issue.
Except for population to grow it requires children which also don’t work, require more resources than elderly, and at the end of 20 years instead of freeing up resources (by dying like the elderly), continue to consume resources.
At the end of 20 years a child becomes an adult, who will (on average) be a net producer. It’s true that children cost more in work put into raising them than older adults take in work to look after them, yet it is a fact of life that one working human is capable of producing more stuff than just that which they themselves needs or makes use of - otherwise it would be impossible to raise children. This should be obvious, and means that the problem of an increasing birth rate, from this perspective, is at most temporary.
But I didn’t say we should have high birth rates, I said that the problems of low birth rates are not due to capitalism.
Land isn’t unlimited. Physical resources aren’t unlimited. For example while a person can manufacture more batteries, with more people on the planet each battery will be more expensive for everyone because each is vying for the same limited resources that are used to make a battery.
I also wouldn’t say that low birthrate is caused by capitalism but by over population. No economic system can sustain unlimited growth. When too many are competing for too few resources, there is no time for families.
You are not talking about what I was talking about, my friend.
Not really anything to do with capitalism. If
You think for-profit healthcare, including elder care, pharma care, and long-term care, aren’t a huge problem with capitalism written all over it, with every layer maximizing profits and minimizing services, then I I urge you to re-assess it.
I can’t really connect this comment with what you originally said. Maybe this will help clarify my position: I think countries with public health and social care, just like countries with mainly private health and social care, will have severe problems if they can’t arrest the rate at which their populations are ageing. My comment explains in very general terms why I think that is the case.
Who gives a shit. I’ll be dead.
The tricky part of being in society is that we want systems that work for more than just ourselves: It’s not a purely transactional relationship.
Great news! It doesn’t affect you either way, so we know your opinion on the matter is completely unbiased. That’s excellent.
Good. There are too many people. Why do we want to expand on a 7billion+ population when so many of us are struggling? How about we only have as many people as we have resources for everyone having a good life?
I’m not arguing for population growth but we definitely have more than enough resources for everyone now. Scarcity isn’t the problem, it’s that we allow people to hoard those resources and we waste a ton of them.
When we can prove it by providing everyone the same (good) standard of life, across the entire world, then I’ll believe it.
Stuff like everyone has housing, clean safe water, safe to eat food, able to escape from extreme climate swings, healthcare, vacation, parental leave, and I’m sure lots more that I’m not thinking of.
Once everyone has that, then we can look at what we can expand on
We will never have that as long as we live in a capitalist society
“We have enough resources” is such a shitty god damned argument. At least you didn’t go “hurr durr everyone on the planet can fit in Manhattan if they just squeeze tightly”.
But god damned ask yourself what kind of world you want to live in, not min maxxing the number of people alive for some absolutely incomprehensible reason.
“WE CAN SQUEEZE ONE MORE IN THERE, BOYS! SHE CAN TAKE IT!”
For WHAT?! WHY?!
You people, I swear. I said specifically that I’m not arguing for increased population and yet your whole response is structured like that’s exactly what I said we should do. Do you even read what you respond to or do you just scan until you find the right key word to launch into a rant?
Did I miss something? You said it is a “shitty” argument, but you never state what is wrong with it.
Well if we could make everyone have a good quality of life and not destroy the environment and at the same time have more people to enjoy life and to help drive innovation and art, it would generally be for the better.
I don’t think you comprehend exactly how large a number 7 billion actually is. There’s plenty of innovation and art potential already.
Currently a good portion of those people are barely surviving and don’t have bandwidth for art or effective innovation. But that’s not really the point. If people are happy and have a good quality of life, and there’s no negatives, then more is better because it’s more happiness.
But think about the profits! We need more people to exploit, if there aren’t enough people to replace those who demand disgusting things like “actual living wages” with ones that are just happy to get any job at all, where do you think we’ll end up?? We’d have to actually value workers, no, human life itself, instead of just pretending to do so while treating them all as replaceable as they are! And, most importantly, this would hurt my bottom line! I need a new yacht this year, ok? You just don’t understand how important my wants truly are, ok?? So stop spreading such nonsense! ~ Pretty much every CEO out there, probably
After all this time humanity finally created a world with high life expectancy, just to start wondering now whether we should.
As long as that high lifespan comes with a high healthspan, it shouldn’t be a problem.
True, but that’s not the case yet. Old people generally need healthcare and other services (provided by young people).
And they don’t provide anything in return from their care homes. Honestly, it’s best to just send them off on an ice floe.
It would be better to keep them integrated in communities so they can serve as elders- providing advice, supporting children and parents, and spreading their community’s history.
The care homes are the problem, not the need for care.
True, that would be even better but sounds like communism so it won’t happen. I would certainly prefer it
After all this time humanity finally created a world with high life expectancy…
…and it only cost the sustainability of the lower class and the entire global south.
We fucked the climate up enough for it to cost the next generations the global north as well
That’s quite an achievement. We’re so awesome!
Of course we should. People dying is horrible. Anyone who thinks otherwise can opt in to check out.
Of course I agree people dying is horrible, but there need to be enough people to take care of the elderly and to keep society running. Best hope for care robots I guess, although that seems dystopian too.
If only that were legal in many places.
It is indeed fine. In 1900 there were about 1.6 milliard people, versus the 8.3 today.
Oh no we are running out of people!
Senior citizens do not out number young people, however there is almost as many senior citizens as young people and that may be some cause for concern
Young kids, not all young people.
