Degrowth

This may answer your question. I've read that the only way to continue making a profit, aka be better off than the laboring masses, is to use human labor power to produce products/services. Why? Because if a process is automated, the process's rate of profit will eventually fall to zero. Why? Competition with other businesses that automate will drive the price down as low as it can go (unless of course there's collusion or a monopoly is allowed to exist).

Put another way, in order to make money, you need to be able to pay your labor less than the value of whatever they're producing. If the whole process is automated, there's no one to pay at all, which is amazing for a hot second, but once another business copies and undercuts you, you need to lower your price to match theirs. Then a third person copies and undercuts you both, and before you know it you're not making any money because everyone is selling a fraction of a cent above cost.

They want a cheap work force to steal wealth. That can be done by having a lot of supply in other words natalism or it can be done by lowering demand using technology. They obviously go for both.

You know economics is about resources and there isn't some magical system that gets around resource distribution, right?

Economics has been termed the dismal science for a reason. A permanent solution to the demographic problems of people living longer will either involve people accepting a lower living standard than they otherwise could have or having people work longer before retiring. Or maybe Logan's Run? It doesn't matter if it's a capitalist society or a socialist society the problems are the same, large population not producing anything but still consuming resources.

But chill, as a great economist once said, in the long run we're all dead anyway. There's still a massive pool of people that want to live in our ever-growing populations. We just gotta stop letting people make us think immigration is a bad thing. It'll be a long time before the entire world is living at the same standard of living we enjoy in the developed world, and with so many people getting suckered into making their countries backwards and authoritarian (thanks, Putin!) it doesn't look like we're going to run out of immigrants that will be willing to move to an affluent democracy any time in our lifetimes.

If we get to a point where we can no longer depend on attracting immigrants because every country in the world is an affluent democracy... well that's a good problem to have, isn't it?

Some people talking to you don't seem to be getting it. There's a Kurzgesagt video about Demographic collapse in South Korea. The issue is: You have a country with a boundary, and the entire country can't take care of its elderly, and because it is getting poorer, can't attract people from other nations to take care of its elderly either. This kills the "nation", which can't defend itself and doesn't really have anything to look forward to.

Economic crises drive political crises. The trend towards far-right authoritarianism is a global one. People under stress (of many different sorts) favour authoritarianism for some reason.

The pathogen-stress theory of authoritarianism is fairly well studied and has proven robust. There’s similar support for theories of economic stress and poverty driving support for authoritarianism. Population declines can be a major source of economic stress due to the way older generations need to be financially supported by younger workers.

Yes, sustainability has to be part of any solution.

This person has class consciousness!

You're in c/degrowth. Retirement from economic growth "generating" "passive income" isn't a feature.

You will receive less retirement money than Millennials (who will get less than Boomers), while the percentage of your income for pensions increases monthly, and the retirement age rises. This change won’t happen suddenly but in waves.

Many liberal governments in Europe are currently pushing to raise the retirement age. For example, in my country, reforms have already ensured that by the time I reach retirement age, it will be set at 74.

As a friend who was going through the process of getting citizenship once said "I think Canada wants me as a citizen for the tax revenue."

Yup. That's the deal... immigration = more tax revenue. It's actually way better than having more children. Society has to pay for the education and healthcare for children and doesn't see a dime of tax revenue until the very earliest 18 years, and more likely >20 years. An immigrant that's already educated immediately starts working and paying taxes.

Immigration is basically the cheat code for demographic problems.

The main problem is that boomers didn't move out of their houses into nursing homes (or at least small apartments) as early as previous generations so we have some housing problems. But the boomers won't live forever and when they die off, housing will be freed up.

Does it? The Canadian fertility rate dropped below replacement in 1971, which is also the case for most other Western countries.

We don't need fewer people, we need more political will and less political won't. There are more than enough resources to feed and clothe mankind and we now have an extremely effective global delivery system in place, so there is no excuse for not ending global poverty.

There are a lot of problems with that. First of all just looking at the elderly is a problem. There are also children, which do cost a society quite a lot of resources. With a low birth rate that group is becoming smaller and smaller. Right now that dependency ratio is at 41.43%. That is actually incredibly low. The US is at 53.88% and Japan is at 69.94%. That is dependent person per worker.

Then the assumption of not keeping up with certain services. Although that is true, there is another site to it the video completely ignores. The population is shrinking and the country has a lot of high quality infrastructure. That means low housing prices, as they are already built. No need to built new railways, streets, sewage systems and the like.

That also goes for the economy. Constant worker shortages, mean the most competitive companies will pay the highest wages and out compete weaker ones. Therefore the average worker will become more competitive.

One important thing here is that South Korea has an incredibly low fertility rate. 2.1 is replacement level. So 0.7 means each generation is 2/3 smaller then the previous one. However most places in the world are above 1.4, which would just mean 1/3 less people per generation, which makes it a lot more manageable. Also again migration. The world is still above replacement level of 2.1.

That video changed your perspective? It was entirely full of assumptions. Yeah, sure, if things continue as they are now and nothing changes, then economic issues will ensue. HOWEVER, things will change, societies will react and adapt to the evolving situation. So all the doom and gloom predicted in that video is just that, a shit prediction based on shit assumptions.

from kurzgesagt

red flag

Can't even say "eat the rich" anymore because most of them are old and stringy.