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?
It’s too late for SK.
And even if it weren’t, there’s a lot of policy problems (immigration, sexism, internal cultural ones) that fall outside economic systems. “Just switch the economic system so people will want to have babies” is the other side of the coin of the hard right’s “just value traditional families so people will want to have babies.”
To reiterate, I am saying this meme is wrong in portraying low birth rates as mostly a problem of the neoliberal capitalist economic system, even though it is a major contributor. A magic switchover would not fix it.
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.
The word “for” does a lot of heavy lifting in there.
My condo building just got rid of the company that meters our water. After years of this we could finally break the contract.
My water bill usage was something like $15/mo and they had an admin fee of $13/mo. In a building of like 150 apartments, those guys were raking in like $2k a month from us for keeping their automated shit plugged in.
The managers said they would just stop metering and our monthly fees would pay the bill. After a year, they would adjust our monthly rates to balance it out.
They never had to balance it out - that’s how little the overall water usage cost was.
The so-called birthrate crisis is manufactured by morons like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk who clearly didn’t pay attention in science class and didn’t learn about logistic population growth https://www.britannica.com/science/population-ecology/Logistic-population-growth and those who see a line going down and assume it will keep going down at the same rate forever.
People understand the concept of, “no infinite growth on a finite planet,” but then refuse to accept that that holds true for us as well. The world population has more than doubled in my lifetime. Obviously we can’t do that forever. Especially in the context of a climate crisis that is making less land livable over time. For completely practical reasons we are going to have to set up some kind of system that can function in equilibrium rather than requiring growth.
This is true but people focus so hard on the population they miss the wider issue. Its not the number of people thats the issue right now, its the massively uneccesary amount of resources each person uses.
The world can accomodate a lot of people IF we shift the way we do things. If we all live like the world is an endless piggy bank, it wont work.
Without considering the way we live and the system we’ve built, people begin sliding into borderline eco-fascist ideas of population control because its an easy thing to understand and latch onto. But the situation is much more complicated than that.
So yes, there is a finite human population limit but that doesnt mean we’ve hit it or are even going to hit it.
Its not the number of people thats the issue right now, its the massively uneccesary amount of resources each person uses.
so your proposal is to increase the population count, but decrease how much each person has available as resources? Essentially just throwing a lot of people into poverty?
No. And you either know that and are strawmanning or are brainwashed into thinking excessive resource use equates to wellbeing.
well if you think excessive resource use has nothing to do with wellbeing, i’d happily take your excessive resources from you :)
Ok so you have no counter argument. Got it.
There is a MASSIVE middle ground between overconsumption and excess consumerism, and actual poverty.
Pretending that any amount of scaling back consumption inevitably leads to mass poverty is intellectually dishonest, or just genuinely stupid.
Which are you?
hey man, why would you respond like this? can’t you discuss things in good faith instead?
maybe i’m a bit heated about this topic, but that is solely because i think it’s really important for humanity’s wellbeing that the statement that “we need more people” doesn’t prevail. But i recognize i can’t explain that to you’all properly.
Nobody said ‘we need more people’. Your failure to comprehend an argument is not our responsibility.
if you get heated you should take a break, come back later, and re-read the thing you’re responding to. otherwise you may misinterpret people’s intent. your response doesn’t match what they said.
but decrease how much each person has available as resources? Essentially just throwing a lot of people into poverty?
That is not implied. Especially if we consider that the resources we waste are through supply chains rather than our own direct use. If my electrical supply comes from from a more efficient source, then my usage can be less wasteful and potentially cheaper. If my city continues to improve public transport, I can actually save money and use less resources in daily transit. Products we consume have serious potential to conserve resources at a mass scale, and often it even saves them money due to paying less for resources needed in production. A lot of waste also comes from overproduction, think of those Dunkin’ Donuts end-of-day-disposal videos. We make far more than we need in so many areas.
Furthermore, the most wasteful people are a minority of the mega-rich. You and I probably don’t need to cut down much on jet fuel costs. People close to poverty usually aren’t (directly) wasteful, hell, some of them actually reduce waste through dumpster-diving and recycling schemes.
It’s not about decreasing how much each person has - quite the opposite, actually. It’s about increasing the efficiency of how we distribute our resources so that more gets to those who need it because we already have far more than we need but most of it is wasted or artificially made scarce to increase profit.
The US throws away something like 60% of the food we produce annually while kids starve and politicians talk about getting rid of free lunches at schools.
The “overpopulation” fear is really just misdirection from the greedy few to keep the rest of us from questioning why we let them get away with everything.
function in equilibrium rather than requiring growth.
Not only that, a system that can adapt to changes where the equilibrium might shift over time. We have a lot of work to do to undo the climate crisis, if we even can, and if not, we’ll be living in a geologically different planet when we do.
World population will reach a maximum of 9 million and then slowly decline as birth rates have fallen massively everywhere. However, in some countries the birth rate has fallen so much that it will be a huge problem. In those countries young people will have almost no peers while growing up, and in the context of Democracy old people will have a majority. See the Kurzgesagt video for what live will be like in South Korea: https://youtu.be/Ufmu1WD2TSk
I said it before and I’ll say it again …
It’s not about the quantity of life
It’s about the quality of life
If you make the world a capitalistic hell hole where people are constantly worked to the bone without much reward and no time to enjoy their lives, then chances are, they won’t be motivated or even healthy enough to want to have children. In the premodern wild, people had many children because they had time and they knew that conditions had the possibility of improving in the future. Sure, many of their children died but they knew that the ones who did survive would have a chance to survive if they worked hard enough because they knew their work would be rewarded.
In our current world … you can work until your hands fall off and you won’t be rewarded. More and more people are realizing that they don’t want that for themselves so why should they do that to their unborn children?
The conditions for humanity are falling everywhere and people are so compassionate for their children that many of them feel like they don’t want to bring their children into this hell hole we’ve created if 99.99% of everyone has no chance at a good life.
Availability of education and basic needs is inversely proportional to birthrates.
Availability of education and basic needs is inversely proportional to birthrates.
This is a lie. It’s a lie promulgated by wealthy interests to fight against economic redistribution. You can only reach the conclusion that wealth has no impact on birth rate by making inappropriate comparisons between countries. But when you look within countries, the true relationship is revealed.
There is no relationship between wealth and number of kids…until you reach an income level of $300k or so. Then, there is a very strong correlation. It makes sense. In the US, that’s about the level of income you need to really be insulated from the worst aspects of the US’s economic system. At that point, you can afford to send your kids to a decent school. You don’t have to worry about going bankrupt from health care costs. You can likely afford to have a parent stay home if necessary. At that income level, you’re able to simply purchase the level of stability that would come with a proper social safety net. And once people have some stability and security, they start having kids.
I was using the mathematician Hans Rosling as a reference. He researches how to slow population growth.
You’re forgetting another portion of the calculation: amount of resources, and resource generation rate.
Take food for example. We have, and create, far more food than is needed. If that rate continues, we can theoretically keep pumping out people until the birth rates and food generation rates converge.
The actual problem, as it stands currently, is not the amount of resources, or how quickly we can create them: the problem is how they are distributed.
Food, water, shelter, safety. Those are the basic needs. I didn’t forget. But yes, distribution is the main cause of food scarcity.
On a reread, I realise distribution is a part of “availability”, so i may have misinterpreted earlier. Sorry.
Capitalism is all about using other people so that YOU can have an amazing quality of life. And even if you’re at the lower end of the economy in the US or Europe, your standard of living is propped up by third world labor, so really I strongly doubt that anyone here is in a position to say they’d be better off without capitalism. Most of the world, yes. Smartphone owning westerners: get real, colonizers.
This assumes that said smartphones can only feasibly be created the way they currently are, and no other way. Can you genuinely not imagine minerals being mined, electronics assembled, by well paid workers?
Thats not to say the current absurd rate would still be sustainable in such conditions, but i don’t think you can definitively say that losing capitalism would inevitably mean a decrease in living standards. A well managed transition to socialism could maintain much of our luxuries.
Where did I say most phones can never be fairly or sustainably produced? It’s almost like you’re replying to the wrong comment, because I never said I can’t imagine miners being well paid.
I happen to agree with the points you made. I was just describing the current conditions. I think that people at the lower end of the American economy believe they’re getting screwed by capitalism, when they don’t actually know what screwed is, or how they too are complicit in the same exploitation they cry out against, just with invisible foreign workers.
If we’re going to move beyond capitalism, we need to understand what we stand to gain and lose. I don’t think most do.
You implied that westerners would be much worse off without capitalism, and specifically referred to smartphones, seemed clear to me
Capitalism as we have it absolutely favors westerners. Yes I’m saying that. How does that imply that I don’t think phones can ever be produced sustainably/fairly? Please explain the words you’re putting in my mouth.
Didn’t i just explain to you my thought process? I’m not putting words in your mouth, it just seemed that’s what you were getting at. Otherwise the smartphone reference seems totally random
Didn’t i just explain to you my thought process?
Insufficiently, I guess because I did not follow.
Smartphones are made with cheap third world labor. Everyone in the US has one, even those of us supposedly getting so exploited by capitalism. Therefore, the smartphone is like a membership card in the “capitalist exploiters” club. Which I was saying we all belong to.
It also takes knowing stopping births is possible and having the access to it. In lthe midst of the worst atrocities in human history we have still had sex. Slaves in the American south still had children in conditions that vastly outstrip anything else in modern capitalism. Native Americans still had children as disease killed 90% of their population. As long as there is enough food to keep survivors healthy enough to concieve and carry to term we have always had children. Because we always seek comfort from one another and sometimes that’s sexual.
Now we have the opportunity to get that comfort without bringing in the child and we do.
Unless you expect people to work until they drop dead it’s a crisis regardless of the economic system, especially coupled with the increases in life expectancy. You have fewer and fewer people of working age who have to provide for and take care of more and more old people for longer and longer. Even if you eliminate profit motives, you’re placing an outsized burden on younger generations.
The notion that a decreasing population is a capitalism issue is straight childish. First-world demographics are going top heavy fast. And for all the cries that, “They just want more workers!”, I say, yes, that would be the point.
The more advanced a society is the larger the population needed just to keep people fed and housed, regardless of the system.
This is why agriculture was a trap. It let us have more people which led to needing more people to support the population.
You made the case for the inverse - agriculture had many more kids while technological advances are leading to fewer over time
I’m saying that there’s a minimum viable population for a technological society like ours and if we have too few people working it’s going to collapse.
Maybe it should collapse. Survival of the fittest applies just as well to societies and economic systems. If capitalism is so comically dysfunctional that it cannot even provide people enough that they feel comfortable having kids…when reproduction is the most natural, biologically fundamental thing in the world? Yeah, that is clearly a sick and depraved system that doesn’t deserve to continue to exist on this Earth. Let it fall.
expect people to work until they drop dead
that’s literally the direction we’re going, regardless of birthrate. yes, it is a crisis. france rioted over this. we just shrugged and said meh, cross that bridge something something
Yea but that cuts into corporate profits soooooo why not force a population of people to turn out babies like the good old days!
You think raising kids is free? The cost to raise a child including college is more expensive than end of life care for elderly.
($27k/ year California plus $14k/year for public school for a total of $41k per year for ages 5-18. Then college which is even more expensive.) That’s a minimum of $800k.
That compares to $150k of full medical care for last 3 years for elderly. Before that they are self sufficient and have minimal costs.
https://bmcpalliatcare.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12904-023-01197-2
And when elderly die, they free up resources for the next generation.
Self sufficient? So youre saying they grow their own food and repair all their own homes?
It’s a simple problem of not enough laborers to provide all the menial everyday ressources people want/need, while a growing number of people is retired and still consumes these things. We’re technologically advanced enough that it won’t cause us to starve, but fewer people making things when the same amount of people consumes things will always lead to lower quality of life if technology doesn’t offset it by automating labor.
Capitalism is merely the cruelest system at this, since it will always fuck over the vulnerable first. Under capitalism it’s a problem for old people and everyone whose elderly parents are still alive, under a fairer system it would equally affect everyone, but to a lesser degree.
Money is a representation of the labor. Do children grow their own food? Do you?
Yes. But the elderly get that money from past labor. Which does not contribute in the present. The entire system of retirement is built on the assumption that you work for more than 1 person until retirement to provide for the elderly (and well, also to provide for children) so that then, once you are retired yourself, the next generation will provide for you.
There being fewer children does feather the effects a little though.
There being fewer children does feather the effects a little though.
Neither children nor elderly work. Being that children cost more (require more labor input) than elderly, there is a surplus from having fewer children.
Ideally social security, Medicaid and Medicare should’ve been implemented as individual accounts. You get what you pay for with an extra amount being collected for disability insurance. Politically impractical but mathematically solves the problem of fluctuating population numbers.
That wouldn’t help. Retirement accounts are just as affected by population pyramids as state social welfare systems. They’re just obfuscated.
As technology improves to reduce workforce needed, it frees up more people to enter elder care workforce.
So things can still balance out.
It’s going to happen eventually whether you like it or not. The harm has already been done, do not delay the consequences.
When the state pension was introduced in the UK back in the early 20th century it was set at about 2 years below average life expectancy. It just wasn’t increased as life expectancy went up. I wouldn’t be surprised if other countries are the same.
How many people work in health care now? How many people are under/unemployed? How long will elderly live?
Do you see how this isn’t a crisis for anyone but the rich?
You did nothing to explain how it’s not a crisis for the poor.
You’re looking at it purely from a present-day perspective. Just because the pool of available workers is large enough today to provide for everybody doesn’t mean that it will be fifty years into the future. It’s not about “infinite growth” it’s about providing a consistent standard of living and a fair generational contract that doesn’t place an undue burden on future generations.
Well, there’s a simple fix. Since 1970, the standard of living for 90% of the population in the US has been stagnant or declining. We have absolutely increased our GDP, our productivity, and our total economic output. But all the gains have gone to the top 10%. You could tax all economic growth past the 1970 level at 100%, and 90% of the country wouldn’t even notice.
HEALTHCARE has a definitely shortage in alot of areas, nursing, doctors, and there so much fuckery going on with those industries too make it an unattractive option, Nursing you might be enticed to go as a traveling nurse, since they can make a High income earner. Others like CLS have limited amount of schools that will even teach for the certification it requires,(its a grad level certification) and thus the competition for these school is very high, and they all try to come to cali for it.
Agree, when I hear billionaires complain about low birth rates I don’t relate. Your problem, not mine. Maybe make it more affordable and less impactful on the planet, then it’s more tolerable, but otherwise not really.
maybe tell them to pay the trillions they have paid in the last few decade. and wasting money on the oversized budget of defense.
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
people too young to work
I think it’s possible that you might confused how young that meant in 1850.
Define “even”
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
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
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.
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.
Well yes but no. Supporting this many old people is a genuine problem, no matter the economic system.
Sure, a problem in the sense that it requires a solution. Capitalisms solution is infinite population growth via forced pregnancy. A non capitalist option is to simply use the very large amount of resources available to take care of the old folks. It’s not profitable, but that’s not the point.
A non capitalist option is to simply use the very large amount of resources available to take care of the old folks. It’s not profitable, but that’s not the point.
Oh, the capitalists have very much figured out how to cash in on old folks. It’s incredibly lucrative. I can’t imagine them abandoning that gravy train until they’ve siphoned off all that filthy lucre that’s settled out in the aging class.
The clone army is right around the corner. Boy that’s gonna be spicy.
You can’t just borrow or create money to fund things that are not profitable. Not saying infinite population growth is desirable but spending the large amount of resources on old folk does mean not spending it on the young folk = less money to education, health care and infrastructure. It’s not fair to reduce real world problems to ‘you just need to spend your money wiser’
Edit: just to clarify the comment I made above, it doesn’t say we shouldn’t care for retirerees, it is saying you can’t keep the price we pay for supporting them the same if the size of the group if old people rises and the group of people who work to pay for it shrinks. An aging population is a burden to any population in any financial system just like a growing population is a boon. Again, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t care for old people.
Hear me out. Maybe we consider the resources available directly rather than the made up paper system we have to abstract the concept of wealth. Aka, fuck money
the concept of currency is absolutely not the problem… barter systems are hugely complex and incredibly inefficient
currency is (should be) an abstraction of the value of something… to support the population as big as we have we need a system that’s able to manage that complexity
currency unlocks immense amounts of human effort and allow people to do what they want instead of just the things that are wanted in their local area. you can’t really have grants with a barter system, complex supply chains are impossible (so say goodbye to advanced scientific research and most modern technology), large scale planning is over because you can’t guarantee whether you can get the resources you need for the things that you’re able to trade in months or years time (just because your iron supplier wants toilet paper now doesn’t mean he will want it 2 years into the future when you need more iron)
it’s also a multiplier, on top of just reducing work required for every single trade. to do a lot of those large-scale things there will always be cash laying around somewhere - you get given it, and then you need to plan or get it from multiple sources until you have enough to request the resources you need… whenever currency is laying around like this, it’s wasted effort. currency works; currency gets things done when it’s moving; currency sitting around is wasted… when you put that currency in a bank, they’re able to loan it to others, who then put it to good use by being productive. you get that currency back when you’re ready, and all of a sudden there is more done that what would have otherwise been able to be done: that’s what the “made up paper system” allows (and there are many more examples of this)
it could be arguable that there’s plenty to go around and that if everyone is happy living with equality and not extravagance then we wouldn’t need to barter or trade anything… perhaps that’s true person to person (ignoring human behaviour, sociopaths, power over people in and of itself becoming the currency, doing the work that nobody wants to do - some of that can probably be tamed with societal norms and punishment, and technology) but humanity’s understanding of the universe needs to progress to improve everything for everyone, and the more we progress the more complex and large-scale the needs of the projects are that are required to do them… if you have a bundle of resources, how do you allocate them to projects without knowing how much of a dent they’ll make? how do you say which will take more to complete: ITER or the LHC? it’s already impossible for us to comprehend everything about our system of trade without removing the abstraction that simplifies it all so we can reason about it
don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of tweaks to be made to make sure currency again becomes representative of value, but currency in and of itself absolutely makes people’s lives better every single day. unrestrained capitalism is absolutely the problem with currency - currency is just its tool of choice
I’m not against, but it won’t change the facts that every expense can only be made once.
You can’t just borrow or create money to fund things that are not profitable.
BWAHAHA
That’s a good one!
You absolutely can borrow billions of dollars to fund things that have no clear path towards profitability. It’s called Silicon Valley VC. If you’re a member of the aristocracy, it’s easy to borrow money for things that aren’t profitable.
Ok you can, but you have to pay for it. Were talking about society as a while. In a fair world if the people collectively borrow money, the next generation will have to foot the bill.
Mate, it’s not a zero sum game. You can do both.
In a perfect world you can do both because a society has a very wide range of sources of income, but in the end it actually is a zero sum game.
Particularly about the misunderstandings section.
politics and macroeconomics are not zero-sum games, however, because they do not constitute conserved systems
Or if you don’t like Wikipedia, here’s an economics website:
In a non-zero-sum game, it is possible for two parties to both benefit from a decision.
It also lists examples for each.
Zero sum games are often misunderstood and used as a vehicle of misinformation to perpetuate the lie that if you do one desirable thing, you lose the status quo.
Therefore, looking after the young and looking after the old is a non-zero sum game because you can literally do both. My best example is Australia; we have aged care and child care, with plenty of room for subsidising mining corporations.
Can’t you See, that when you have a smaller percentage in young folk, you can improve the quality of living (of education, If health Car, infrastructure) for them and the old Folks? As Thread Opener Said, it would Not be profitable, but it don’t have to be in a post-capitalism World. Its sufficient enough for it to become a Zero sum Game, where expenses are the Same as the realized gains. And once the Population has been reduced to a sustainable amount, we as humanity could start over again, then growing in a sustainable way ( and hopefully Out of this planets restrictions). But oh Well, in Out current track record, this all will be nill, AS capitalism will have Destroyed our fixed Environment - earth - by then.
Yes, less young folk is lower cost. But more old people is higher cost. So the cost of supporting old folk is higher per young person. Even in a fair world, an aging population is a borden tot the young people. I’m not saying we shouldn’t support the old folk, I’m saying there is no magic fix you can achieve by changing how we spend money.
But the larger older Population will only exist in a (relatively) small time frame, until the (significantly) smaller Young Population have catched Up to that age, thereby eliminating this conundrum. And because you can’t burden the young people of the full Impact of the larger old Population, you should subsidize the hell Out of those benefits to the elderly. Because it is only temporary.
It is true it isn’t a problem for the rest of eternity, but this small time frame is indeed relatively as in the people alive at that time will have to go through the consequences for at least a decade probably longer. You can spread that out over a longer period of time with all kinds of economic tools but you can’t erase it entirely is my original point.
Well If your economic system is not built to sustain your countries people sufficiently, and by means of debt for a small timeframe, what is the Point of your economic system then? Maybe its my Point of View of an entitled European, we learn early in school, that the Economy is there to Support the society, and in Turn the society supporting the Economy. As economic success alone has no inherent purpose by itself. That is also why you can Not govern a Country Like a Corporation, and you can Not govern a Corporation Like a Country. A Country has to govern their society and Economy for long term success, this shaping their economic system Like so.
It’s really not a problem though. Half of the work done in society is completely pointless.
Anyone who has worked in a corporate office job can tell you just how much pointless overhead there is in big companies. Improvements in technology haven’t resulted in a decrease in working hours, the standard of work has just been pointlessly increased to consume the same amount of labor hours. Look at computers and their introduction to the office. Things that would have been handled by a single page memo in 1970 are now handled by a 50 page report with glossy images and endless charts and graphics.
The key thing to realize is that companies are not rational. Their behavior is not driven by hard-edged perfectly rational profit and loss decisions. They’re run by people, and people are social animals. And the people running the major companies are a fairly tight knit social group. They all talk with each other, they’re all friends and intermarry with each other’s families. They chase the same fads. Why do you think useless AI models have taken off so much? Historical aristocracies regularly became obsessed with fads. Our aristocracy is currently obsessed with LLMs.
This matters because this aristocratic group-think guides the actions of companies. Companies could have used computer technology to dramatically slash their labor costs. But that was unfashionable among the ownership class. Instead, it became fashionable to simply have the workers use those tools to create more elaborate reports and documentation. It’s the modern office equivalent of a medieval lord pouring resources into a gilded palace and an elaborate retinue of performers. Executives get prestige from having highly paid people create pointless busy work, so that’s what they do.
This pattern can be seen across many fields. Labor-saving devices haven’t been used to reduce total human hours worked, they instead are used to expand the quantity of work done, usually pointlessly. Companies are not rational, and they do not make rational labor decisions.
This is why I am not in the slightest worried about an aging population. You state that too many old people is a genuine problem, no matter the economic system. But that is demonstrably FALSE! Too many old people is not a problem for a society that already employs the majority of its workforce in pointless bullshit jobs. The majority of our labor is pure performative waste; it exists primarily to stroke the egos of the aristocracy. We could cut the total hours worked in half without any decrease in the actual quality of goods and services available for people to enjoy.
Over the last several decades, companies have been able to get by while being incredibly lazy and inefficient. They’ve had the luxury of keeping excess headcount. Yes, it costs money, but prestige is more important than profit once you reach a certain level of wealth. As long as labor has been cheap, the owner class can afford to employ people in largely performative roles.
But with an aging population? The value of labor will skyrocket. Companies will find that they can’t employ scores of people to fill pointless bullshit jobs. Companies that refuse to adapt will simply go bankrupt and be replaced by rationally-run operations.
How are we going to take care of a rapidly greying population? Simple. We’ll just stop wasting most of our labor.
Alternatively: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ättestupa
I find this rhetorical framing unfair and even disingenuous as it suggests, absent clarification, that this is a universal scenario created by any system rather than a scenario that is only common under hierarchical systems that demand continual population growth, like capitalism.
You’d have been better to say “Any system would face problems if suddenly burdened by the consequences of capitalism.”
So wouldn’t adding more make it worse?
Infinite growth! Infinite population growth to feed the machine! More babies!
In the long term, yes. Ideally your birth rate matches your death rate so you have stability in supporting the citizenry. But when your system expects the birth rate to exceed the death rate, even changing to equilibrium can be catastrophic.
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.
Yes, but our consumer society isn’t raising the alarm for those reasons (for the most part)
Why though? Those statements might or might not be true, but they’re totally unqualified.
My mind goes to this video.
I think some in this thread do not fully realize what some of the inherent problems of capitalism are and how they relate to this issue.
In a capitalist economy resources and labour are generally allocated in a way that maximizes profit. Profit is determined based on the prices of things and prices are determined by the exchange value of those things. That often results in the price of something being way higher than what it cost to make it. One result of this is that capitalist economies allocate enormous amount of resources and labour to things that don’t have any beneficial value to society. For example, some of the most skilled labour in America is tasked with figuring out how to get as many people as possible to spend as much time as possible looking at anger-inducing content on their phones. This isn’t contributing in any meaningful, positive way to solving society’s known, difficult long term problems, like ageing population. In fact it likely does the opposite.
In contrast, a socialist economy allocates resources and labour according to society’s needs, which are determined by some mix of economic planning and limited market dynamics. Prices of things are determined through these processes and generally represent how much labour goes into them. As a result, keeping people angry wouldn’t get many skilled engineers allocated to. Instead these people’s labour would for example be employed in automating the shit out of the vital sectors for society’s long term well-being. Like automation in agriculture, healthcare and elder care. And then since labour isn’t allocated or paid on the basis of profit, the socialist economy can keep labour employed in sectors where proven automation already exists and gradually ramp up automation as they retire. Alternatively it could let people retire earlier, or have them do other work if they want to, like community service, or art, or R&D, or childcare, etc. As a result a socialist economy has a better ability to sustain itself with less labour while taking care of its elderly, without enduring crises.
Worse, a capitalist economy has to go through the real material changes, actually allocating labour and resources, producing the things it would produce with its current configuration in order for it to figure out what to change and what to do next. Thus we’re faced with the horror of all these bad decisions that we currently see basically locked-in and consuming vast resources and labour until they become unprofitable or resources or labour are exhausted. Which means we’re very likely to run into crises before the system adjusts to the new realities of diminished labour force. And then we’d likely (as we already are) rush into solving that by importing labour, which is going to get us into social instability due to racism, and we know how that goes. There are plenty current examples to go around. Meanwhile an economy that can do planning can model ahead of time what different future economic configurations would look like, make projections, choose a desired one and have resources and labour allocated on solutions today, thus increase the chances of avoiding acute socioeconomic crises or minimize their scale.
I hope this helps understanding the premise.
And for today’s misallocation of resources in capitalism I give you - https://sh.itjust.works/comment/18820691.
In contrast, a socialist economy allocates resources and labour according to society’s needs, which are determined by some mix of economic planning and limited market dynamics.
The only problem being, that while nice in theory, socialist economies never actually did that in practice. Since humanity has never figured out, how to actually do economic planning in some centralized or semi-centralized way without being very inefficient and corrupt. I used to think AI could do that one day, but I guess that was too optimistic…
It’s easy to see capitalism is terrible. It’s hard to see a better system, that could replace it.
I don’t think that’s true.
Central planning ran the USSR and its satellites for some 40-70 years. They didn’t even have computes for the majority of this period and many of these economies experienced high rates of growth. If I remember correctly, the USSR speedran economic development so that the GDP per cap of the USSR increased 10 times between the beginning and the end of the experiment. The US grew about 3 times during the same period while being the main world hegemon, profiting from the vast majority of the world. Of course there were problems, like the famines in the 30s, but they didn’t repeat post-WWII. It’s not like capitalism hasn’t caused famines around the world either. So despite the standard criticism, I don’t think planning did poorly overall.
China is also demonstrating how long term central economic planning allows to build an economy efficiently, with a long term focus and avoiding most crises capitalist economies experience on regular basis. They’re clearly leading in development of solutions to climate change in a way that is above and beyond any other economy, in solar, wind, battery and EV production. Just earlier this month we saw their emissions fall despite higher electricity usage for the first time. And they’re powering a lot of everyone else’s renewables transition. Then on the ageing front, they’re already doing a lot of manufacturing automation. I read they’re also doing farming automation now. Apparently DJI’s other job is spraying fleets for example. I don’t know much about healthcare and elder care but I imagine they’re either working on reducing labour needs or planning on it. So yeah, while we’re afraid of automation because we know we’ll be left jobless and/or deskilled by the capital owners (even if it eventually leads to a crisis), them socialist fkers don’t have that problem. The more they automate, the less population they need to maintain and grow their standard living, the cheaper they can manufacture what they make, the easier the ageing population problem becomes. Given how many universities they’re opening each year, growing the highly skilled research labour share, I think they’re only going to accelerate these trends.
One more thing about planning - the largest capitalist corporations that deal with actual physical production and large supply chains already do the type of planning that’s been done in past and present socialist states. In fact it’s probably larger and more complex than some whole countries. A common example is Walmart. You’ll find little market forces within its operation. In fact companies like this, that have complex enough products and/or supply chains do everything they can to isolate themselves from the free market in order to decrease uncertainty, therefore increase the likelihood of successfully producing and delivering the product, and of course maximize their profits. If you consider how every major sector of the economy is getting consolidated through competition into a monopoly or oligopoly, and similar economic planning process goes on in most of those, you could perhaps see how capitalism itself trends towards central planning. Of course for profit maximization and not social benefit.
First of all, it is hilarious that as part of criticizing capitalism, you use economic growth as a metric instead of let’s say availability of goods in stores. Yes, if your economy revolves around state directed things like building weapons, infrastructure and growing industry, it gets easier to manage than unpredictable consumer demands.
China started it’s explosive growth when they relaxed their central control. I am not advocating some absolute libertarian market freedom either. Yes, state exerting control, ideally with consumer interests in mind, can be a good thing to avoid the pitfalls of “pure” capitalism. But there are also risks to that, see China overbuilding high speed rail and housing.
And finally, isn’t Walmart the poster example of decentralized planning? It does the “planning” at the level of store selling final goods, where there is best access to data, such as shopping habits and trends. That’s the point of decentralized planning, not having unreliable ad-hoc supply chains.
PS: To be clear, you also have many good points. I addressed only the ones I disagreed with.
Economic growth is just easy to check data. Many people are completely unaware even of that. Not saying you specifically are. If one’s interested beyond that, could look into other indicators such as education, life expectancy, etc.
China’s relaxed some sectors and not others depending on their importance and the competency within.
Generally markets and competition do well in figuring out how to do something we don’t know how to do well and cheap. Once we figure that out for some product or category, profits fall competitors fail and consolidation sets in, cost of production falls further due to decreasing duplication and increased scale. At that stage, you have to re-establish control or the monopoly begins draining resources from the economy by raising prices. I think this is what China’s doing. They do a high level plan on what they want to develop, get their centrally controlled bits needed in place, e.g. capital from banks, raw resources for batteries, then let existing or new companies enter a competitive market to develop the thing. We saw this occur with EVs. I don’t think they’ve reached the consolidation point yet.
A sector that hasn’t been relaxed for example is banking and for a good reason.
But beyond relaxing control, the other very important thing that was relaxed was foreign direct investment. Getting factories built in sectors you don’t have by foreign firms, almost always as joint ventures with the clearly stated goal of knowledge transfer. Personally I think this is likely a bigger contributor to their economic explosion than planning changes although it also requires planning changes itself.
On Walmart, I think what you’re looking at is the feedback mechanism of shop/factory data going up the stack. A Walmart store has no capability of doing the planning needed to get a requested amount of a certain good on its shelves, beyond requesting it from Walmart HQ. Walmart HQ computes and directs everything from telling how many thousand plastic trays a factory in China should make, to eventually getting the 50 requested by a store in Bumfuck Nowhere delivered. Data feedback mechanisms exist in every operation of meaningful complexity. They existed in the USSR, they exist in China, they exist in every corporation I’ve worked in, currently automotive. Every large corporation takes data from its operations, either through people or directly from processes, or both, or from their products themselves, computes projections, decides what to make more of, less of, what program to cancel or start, what input resources to get more or less of, how many people to hire or fire, all in order to support the desired new projection. Then they turn that into their expected growth numbers for the next quarter and spit it out during their investors call.
Economic growth is just easy to check data.
That’s debatable but ok.
Generally markets and competition do well in figuring out how to do something we don’t know how to do well and cheap. Once we figure that out for some product or category, profits fall competitors fail and consolidation sets in, cost of production falls further due to decreasing duplication and increased scale.
Absolutely yes.
A sector that hasn’t been relaxed for example is banking and for a good reason.
Yes, very good reason.
But beyond relaxing control, the other very important thing that was relaxed was foreign direct investment.
So the other big part of capitalism.
On Walmart, I think what you’re looking at is the feedback mechanism of shop/factory data going up the stack.
I think this comes back to what you said before. If we are talking about established items, that you already have suppliers for, then you can centralize it.
But good luck getting beer from a small local brewery stocked. The more centralized, the less flexible and innovative.
Imo if you centralize on a scale of an entire national economy, you would have very hard time dealing with anything that’s not a well established supply line already.
The thing is, you don’t have to centralize the entire economy in order to be positioned to solve for the difficult problems facing us. But I think having a robust long-term looking economic planning in the sectors everything else rests upon, like energy, natural resources, transportation, logistics, education, care, housing, banking, finance, basic research, defense, food, electronics components, chips etc. itself produces small firms that can do new things much easier due to the availability of materials, equipment, capital and labour at low costs. This doesn’t mean that for example every chip made would have to be planned by someone in the capital. Nothing of the short. It means that the planner says, we need to have the designs and ability to mass produce low cost, high performance RISC-V cores for PCB integration by 2025. Then Huawei and SMIC get their shit together and assemble teams to do this. If they need more capital they get it. If there’s someone who wants to start working on a design with a new team, there’s going to be capital available for a startup. Once the core is in production, that core becomes an input for other large and small firms, or individuals who want to do something with a low cost processor in it that now have a viable path to form new firms. This is why there are a shit ton of small Chinese firms making innovative consumer items. This is why US firms keep explaining how they can’t possibly make this or that product in the US in the context of tariffs. When everyone downstream from them is profit maximizing, their inputs become prohibitively expensive. Someone was talking about how much it would cost to source a small neodymium magnet motor for a consumer pump made in the states and said it’s so expensive that it’s only viable for defense, aerospace and such. And then the neodymium still comes from China.
The consumer parts of the economy where you have smaller firms with interesting products often sits at the tip of the existing supply chains and infrastructure. Perhaps use them differently. That’s also true for local breweries as they rarely grow their hops, wheat or build their own equipment from bare metal, or mine the metal.
But even in the consumer sector here (Canada), most of the aisles in our grocery stores are filled by the products of a handful of companies. PepsiCo, Coca-Cola, Unilever, Colgate-Palmolive, Kraft, Nestle, Kellogg’s, Danone, Mars, Mondelez and the store brand. Then you have Big Ag product filling the produce and meat section from the usual suspects. Outside of who provides these firms with direction and who collects their profits, they’re what state-owned enterprises look like.
It means that the planner says, we need to have the designs and ability to mass produce low cost, high performance RISC-V cores for PCB integration by 2025.
But this is the hard part. Who is qualified to say that RISC-V is the way to go instead of x86? An elected politician? Experts? If experts, how do you select them? Who checks they really are experts? Who holds them accountable?
If there’s someone who wants to start working on a design with a new team, there’s going to be capital available for a startup.
Who and how decides if a startup is worthy of funding? How do you prevent ideas being rejected for personal reasons, e.g. religious objection? How do you prevent fraudulent startups?
If they need more capital they get it.
Who and how decides when it is no longer worth it? How do you avoid fraud, wastefulness, etc.?
Since humanity has never figured out, how to actually do economic planning in some centralized or semi-centralized way without being very inefficient and corrupt. I used to think AI could do that one day, but I guess that was too optimistic…
The big national retailers already operate as central planners.
isn’t Walmart the poster example of decentralized planning? It does the “planning” at the level of store selling final goods, where there is best access to data, such as shopping habits and trends. That’s the point of decentralized planning, not having unreliable ad-hoc supply chains.
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Wish I could upvote your comment more than once. Clear as it can be. 👌🏼
I tried making it as concise as possible while preserving the main bits needed to follow the logical arguments and using as little jargon as possible. I’m glad you appreciate it! ☺️
There is enough out there for everyone to live a happy life. We just have to realize it.
We know, realizing it isn’t the issue, it’s (oversimplified) the greed of the ones who stand in the way of making it happen.
I meant realize in the financial sense, as in “to make real”
We’re too dumb and sabotaging of our intelligence because about 1/5 of humanity is too narcissistic to make it work. They won’t let let others thrive because to hold others back is easier than to strive for constant genuine improvement.
How do you propose to solve for this?
1/5 can only stop the 4/5 if they don’t fight back. So many people have been culturally taught to be run over - through distorted ideas of ‘respect’ ‘politeness’ ‘order’ and more.
They won’t let us? No. We won’t let them. Get up and defy them. In whatever style suits one best. Economic strikes, go off grid, protest with weapons, join a hacker organization, stop paying taxes, boycott the companies you hate… List goes on. Any one thing might feel like nothing, but together it is everything. Online there’s so much hopeless content, it is easy to feel like no one else is mobilizing. But they are and they need every single one of us to take action. It’s not important that we have the perfect strategy, it’s important that we all defy together.
When the 4/5 have to fight back to stop the 1/5, they adopt the traits of the 1/5 over time to defeat them and become the next 1/5 with future generations of them eventually creating the need for them to be stopped. Thus creating a cycle that can only solved by a continuous and systemic non violent deposition of the 1/5.
This extends beyond our era into that of previous revolutions of the cycle where tyrants caused their own fall via arrogance and greed.
It usually always translates to “We really need more poor and working class labor so pump out more wage slaves.” We could be a way better society if we move past enriching billionaires and the rich.
