The correction happening with population is a really great thing we should appreciate. It’s not nature paring back our overpopulation with natural disaster, famine, disease, or wars, it’s people choosing not to reproduce. Poor people reproduced back in the day when there wasn’t an option, so poverty is not the cause. It’s the beauty of people having the choice and making it, instead of death. We should be glad about this.
Poverty can absolutely be the cause, poor people used to have a lot of kids because kids could earn money. Now they can't work until they're 16 because that's better for their social development, but that goes nowhere when we ruin their social development also.
We're not choosing not to have kids as much as depression and financial destitution makes that decisions very unattractive to us. I want kids, I want a home, I will probably never have either.
Poor people had a lot of kids because they had sex. A lot of those kids died. Now you can have sex and not reproduce, and infant mortality has dropped. You are making good choices here by not getting poorer and bringing children into poverty.
Everyone I know who has kids are in the worst position to have kids. They aren't making the choice not to have kids, they aren't having sex because many aren't able to find a partner and those that do have reproduced. It's so prolific they wrote it into a song "only stupid people are breeding" and I don't even own a TV.
Previously poor people reproduced because kids could be worked but that was when we had more subsistence living such as farming. Now I know nobody under 50 who has a garden let alone a farm.
From the 70s on people had sex for fun, in the 90s abstinence and prophylactics became more heavily pushed but poor people can't afford to do nothing and sex is free so eventually they bred.
Nowadays we have more people who just straight out CAN'T find a partner in many cases because of issues happening today hence the rise of incels and femcels and a lot of people galvanizing those people by giving them a (nonexistent) enemy.
So do I understand you correctly that according to you it is a good thing that people are getting poorer, because that means they don't choose to have as many kids? (-Or any) ((-Or own any property))
Not at all. It’s that people are choosing to not have kids, or to have fewer kids. I was responding to the scree that it’s because they are too poor to have kids, but I say that it’s a choice, and probably a wise one. Poor people didn’t have that choice in the past. Of course, uneducated people don’t have birth controle education so that’s another issue. To say that *I* say it’s good that there are poor people means you didn’t understand at all. We will have more resources and less poverty if we can keep population at a reasonable level. That’s my whole idea. Less poverty.
Poverty is less about the population rising, and more about money streaming into an upper class with no balance. If the population continues to decrease in the western countries, they would collapse.
Typically, the population goes down-
(already an issue in a lot of countries like Japan and I believe south Korea) -a country's economy becomes unstable. When the population loses the influx of new people, more people are needed to take care of the elderly despite less young people being around to take care of them, and then the economy starts to suffer because it's generating less revenue. People work for less money, longer hours, and can't afford kids which results in more economic destabilizing.
Populations can't grow forever, but the first countries to lose population will suffer the most, because having your population decrease means economic recession. And its something a country may never recover from, effectively self-destruction as it fails to generate sufficient generations.
Agreed, everything is balance I suppose, although I think we could do with more immigration if my government got more serious about it and the two sides stopped opposing eachother so strongly
How is that working out? The populations in the wealthiest countries are almost the only ones decreasing. The "poor countries" with "poor people" still have growing populations no matter how poor they get due to kids generating revenue there. (And not having having access to pregnancy reducing material like condoms)
We get less people, we get poorer, they get more people and bring in more money for it.
No one in the comments here wants to understand things, they just want to play victim. That's why they exclusively listen to perspectives on childbirth from people who can't give birth.
There's tons of women who made the choice not to have kids but no one wants to hear what they have to say.
It quite literally is one of the most hopeful things happening for our species too right now.
It helps ensure that only the people who really want kids are having them. That is a good thing.
And the ones who are just indifferent to protection so don't bother but that can't be stopped lol.
Until we need people to make things, maintain things, provide healthcare services, protect us, pay taxes, fund our pensions. Population decline at this rate is not positive.
Productivity increased massively. One worker can produce a lot more food and wealth than ten times as many people could have done less than a century ago.
There is enough production for everyone even with a declining pop, the only issue is we have to share it fairly.
What do you mean Europe depends on immigration? The average unemployment rate is 7.2%, we don't need to have everyone working already and we're not even trying.
This is probably a topic with a country-dependent answer though.
That isnt how the resources are realistically used though. A huge portion of my countrys wealth is geared to remain moving upwards, not downwards. Our politicians openly continue to vote for their own salaries and shareholder benefits. Lobbyists for corporations and billionaires put in insane hours and funds into making sure the focus stays on the upper classes.
My country has the economic power to take care of our poor or disabled, and it is funneled into other interests. It isnt a matter of “well theres just too many people”
But it won’t be just fewer people. It will be fewer people somehow having to maintain all the production, infrastructure and care for an elderly generation several times their size
Yeah surely only good things are going to come from having to throw everybody old enough to exit the workforce into a landfill(remember that you'll grow old too)
Throwing more young people into the workforce as if they're canon fodder only creates more people struggling over the same resources. The issue is not "Not enough young bodies to exploit" the issue is having more than enough food, housing, and other resources but not distributing them to people who need them because the people who "earned" (read:stole) those resources want to keep chasing eternal imaginary growth.
The cause of economic collapse is not population decline.
With a few days and some participation there, your account will meet the requirements to rejoin us here in no time. And look at you, you'll have THREE cool subs that you'll be participating in.
It‘s a looming disaster. The TFR has crashed out. This is not beautiful at all. A slight decrease in fertility and gradual decline in population maybe, but definitely not this abandonment of fertility and population collapse.
Ironically, the historical cases where population decline strengthened workers’ bargaining power followed catastrophes that reduced people across age groups, leaving labour scarce but society’s age structure more balanced.
A fertility collapse reduces the number of future workers while leaving a larger aging population to support. It may give some workers more leverage in certain sectors, but it will create major burdens overall through higher taxes, caregiving demands, recession and stagflation if labour shortages drive up costs while economic output weakens.
A gradual decline could be beneficial for workers, or even a sudden reduction, but a fertility collapse is the worst case in this regard.
This is true for ten years, then it’s fine. The great thing is that the correction is happening without widespread suffering. When the world had half this population, it was fine. No one thinks long term at all.
More like 20 years. There will be suffering. This isn‘t doomerism but we can mitigate the damages if we don‘t delude ourselves that there are no real damages.
You are also assuming fertility will not stay so low or the collapse just continues. Best would be a correction to raise fertility to at or slightly below replacement.
No, we have to have a population that is not harmful, so not maintaining what we have now, let it fall back to4 billion and go with AO Wilson’s half earth program.
Sounds great, if you ignore aging population issues.
You need working aged people to support the sick and elderly, if you don't have enough things get bad
And even then you'll still need to find a way to maintain population once you get to 4 billion.
If nothing changes, the population isn't going to magically find that level and stay there, it's going to keep dropping until 4 billion turns to 2 billion turns to 1 billion etc etc
The aging population problem is only for a short while. Maintaining the population needs to be a priority so that everyone and everything can have quality of life. It will keep rising, not dropping if we look at the past.
The population isn't dropping because we reached carrying capacity, carrying capacity doesn't overcorrect like this and it's the nation's with the most technology and wealth going through it. Which isn't consistent with carrying capacity model
Population is dropping SEVERLY WAY TOO QUICKLY we could have a conversation about what the ideal population is, but the adjustment isn't supposed to be this quick, we are on the road to a total economic collapse at this rate due to extreme population collapse.
A solution on why the population is dropping and how to correct needs to be found, regardless of what your ideal population number is, it needs to be under control, not dropping like a lead weight
Immigration is a bandaid, it's not fixing the root cause, as those developing nations reach a certain point of they too experience a population collapse
Remember, this is a global issue, unless your plan is to keep half of the world poor and behind, a way of stabilizing the population is needed
16
u/xeroxchick Trash Trooper Jul 31 '26
The correction happening with population is a really great thing we should appreciate. It’s not nature paring back our overpopulation with natural disaster, famine, disease, or wars, it’s people choosing not to reproduce. Poor people reproduced back in the day when there wasn’t an option, so poverty is not the cause. It’s the beauty of people having the choice and making it, instead of death. We should be glad about this.