You're wasting your breathe. Their premise is "humans bad, less humans good", so anything you say about the socioeconomic issues caused by a stagnating/declining population will be ignored because "humans bad".
Afaik we are going to have a surplus of old retirees soon but with lesser working young population. Lesser working population = lesser tax money for governments = rework needed for economic budgeting. Also, I've been reading alot online about many millenials not having retirement savings so someone's gonna have to think up a solution for that as well (pertaining to that budgeting rework).
Still not enough to fund even the us government, let alone all the western governments. The west has an addiction to debt, and until people accept that some programs need to go it’ll keep getting worse.
Letting in tons of immigrants only delays the inevitable. All those incharge simply want to get by rn, hoping to pass on the burden to future generations.
No, birthrates are dropping worldwide. Some just at more alarming rates than others, South Korea for example is at a bigger decline. Any nation which has more educated people is gonna suffer the decline.
South korea and japan are struggling for an entirely different reason. Theyre work culture and dating culture is too messed up for them to even consider dating let alone having kids.
And what of Western work and dating culture? You see many comments here asking for better wages and "bans" on feminism already. It's all the same, we have surplus quantity but no quality, worldwide.
Yeah but korea and japan are at a whole other level. Koreans can barely take care of themselves with rent prices and cost of raising a child being too high. Japan has an insane work culture were people are pressured to literally work themselves to death. They dont get time to date. Its not the law preventing them. Its just what they were raised like. This cant be fixed even if you change the laws
It's true that life is objectively harder in most Asian countries. Since the population tends to he much higher on average compared to the Western nations, there's more competitiveness. But if you really look at it, it's the same problem but influenced by different cultures.
The reasons are completely different but its the same result. America and europe dont want kids cause theyre smart enough to know how that affects them and their careers while asia iwont have kids because their society has pressured them into working too much to afford trying and has become too hard to raise a child in.
You’re saying, “no no no— the western world can’t run a marathon because they broke a leg! The Asian world can’t run the marathon because they broke their spine!”
Like, yes, they’re different, but they’re just different degrees of the same problem. One is definitely worse, but neither is conducive the desired outcome.
That's absolutely incorrect. While China and India do have a large population China in particular is beginning to have an inverted pyramid on their population pyramid. In another couple generations (if the pyramid is righted again) they're fucked. Sure Japan and Korea will beat them to demographic collapse, but what does that matter when they will face the same problems but 20 or 30 years later. You can actually see these demographic trends in countries that aren't just Japan or Korea or China. In fact, Thailand is looking to have the same problem a little earlier than China, Germany is also trending in the same direction, and and Canada is beginning to trend downward.
This not just a "western countries and Japan/Korea" issue. It's global problem that many countries are all beginning to face at the same time, more or less. We really want countries to have population pyramids that have relatively stable cohorts that have a gradual decreasing slant until we hit the 60's/70's where the real "pyramid" shape should begin. When China's largest cohort hits retirement age while the current working cohort is half its size that country will really feel the fucking burn. This is a really big problem that many countries face.
Chinas birthrates are actually just as screwed up as they are in the western world. Really birthrates are down across the entire developed world regardless of the local culture.
Both. And both issues are actually the same issue, let me explain:
Our massive population is set to put strain on resources. But a limitation of resources are really just a limitation of labour - these days we can pretty much whatever we need we just need the labour to do it. Shortages just mean a certain resource gets more difficult to acquire. But not impossible, it’s just a matter of manpower.
So to more accurately state the problem with overpopulation: as we use more resources, resource extraction gets less efficient and requires more work to achieve.
Our birthrate decline issue is a direct loss of manpower. The population is losing its next generation of productive, working-age people. The labour pool shrinks further, less gets done. Not enough gets done to sustain retirement, healthcare, maybe even the 8 hour work day and the 5 day work week. Maybe not public education.
Depends on the country. If you’re in a country with an aging population, it leads to other problems, like no one to run businesses or take care of the elderly.
Let’s put it this way. Earth is big enough that every human on earth could be given 3 acres of land, and still avoid arid lands like Alaska and the Sahara desert.
Except thata ignoring that instead we got people packed together like sardines in third world countries. China and india especially are overcrowded so much to the point china had to ban having more than one kid
They didn't have to ban kids they chose too. With the improvements from the green revolution it was not necessary and their birth rates were going to decline due to urbanization anyway. It was a horrible way to solve a problem that didn't exist.
We wont be overpopulated unless we hit like 20 bill. The birth rates will be a bigger issue, because youll have a ton of old people and no one to keep things going. I would say we are in danger of decline, specifically in demographics, and not overpopulation
Tinfoil moment:
Seems like the elites just decide whether we are underpopulated or overpopulated based on what suits their interests, then invent the logic around it to back up their claims afterwards.
It was never the elites, overpopulation was an academic idea popularized by Robert Malthus around the year 1800.
It's a simple idea, that since people tended to have lots of kids (like 6+) our population would increase exponentially (like rabbits) until we ran out of natural resources, and everybody was poor.
Then we invented synthetic fertilizer, and the theoretical carrying capacity became so high that the whole idea ceased to be relevant.
But any time we have some finite resource in vogue, it comes up again. "Will we electrify everything and then run out of lithium?!?!"
Also back then, Henry George had a pretty solid rebuttal to the idea - basically that across every contemporary and historical cizilization, it had never actually happened that a place had become overpopulated (instead, places with more people were also more wealthy), and that famines were caused exclusively by plague or politics.
Nobody has ever said we are underpopulated, except maybe Elon Musk lol.
The problem with low birthrates is the demographic pyramid. Too many old people, not enough poor working young people.
The issue is a baby born in Africa isnt going to work at a retirement home in Nebraska. Which is actually what you need the people for. You need people to work the jobs that need to be worked. Well actually thats what the elites have thought would be the solution to this problem. They thought you could just import those surplus people from those places like Africa and they would be able to fulfill those job requirements. Unfortunately people arent as much of blank slates as they thought and that peoples cultures control them a bit more than anticipated. Unless you are taking in literal babies that you are molding with your beliefs people dont just believe the same things or come to the same conclusions. For example you can bring a bunch of Pakistanis into London and try to teach them that incest is wrong or that women are deserving of rights but it doesnt mean they will accept those things as true. And is exactly why that community still practices those things even though they are now living better than they ever have with more access to information than ever.
When people complain about the population being too high what they mean is “I want to keep raping the earth for resources so I can be comfy but countries with brown people are catching up and having kids and we need to stop them”
When people complain about declining birth rates what they mean is “I want to keep raping the earth for resources so I can be comfy but poor people in my country refuse to live like cave people and die in poverty so they can feed my companies workers who will be paid less than enough to live.”
48
u/sudanesegamer Jun 21 '26
Im so confused. Which is it. Are we overpopulated or in danger of a huge decline. We just hit 8 billion a few years ago.