this post was submitted on 25 Jun 2024
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[–] [email protected] 132 points 4 months ago (13 children)

"A reduction in the share of workers can lead to labor shortages, which may raise the bargaining power of employees and lift wages — all of which is ultimately inflationary,” Simona Paravani-Mellinghoff, managing director at BlackRock, wrote in an analysis last year.

And while net immigration has helped offset demographic problems facing rich countries in the past, the shrinking population is now a global phenomenon. “This is critical because it implies advanced economies may start to struggle to ‘import’ labour from such places either via migration or sourcing goods,” wrote Paravani-Mellinghoff.

This is just mask-off capitalism. They want people to have a lot of babies, and/or large numbers of poor and desperate people migrating into the country, so that they have a constant, reliable source of cheap labor.

[–] [email protected] 64 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Paying workers more is inflationary, but raising the cost of goods because you control the supply chain is "business"

Basically, raising product costs to cover increased labour costs are bad because actual workers are getting that money instead of the wealthy capital class.

I wish people understood boycotting more. Sure 6 companies own everything, but remember when the cost of a barrel of oil went significantly negative because people weren't driving for 2 weeks?

If people collectively decided they didn't want to buy anything but the absolute necessary staples for a few months there would be an absolute catastrophe in the supply chain and they'd be forced to lower prices significantly.

They may not lower prices forever, but modern business is built entirely on supply chain logistics. If people stop buying anything, or buy things exclusively to return them we would see some serious changes

[–] [email protected] 33 points 4 months ago (1 children)

I've tried to convince people that if we can have a No Nut November, we ought to be able to put together a No-Sales September or something. These mentally defective executives would absolutely go back to taking care of the customer if this were a practice.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 4 months ago

We should definitely do November for it - holiday shopping and Black Friday specifically.

Hell, if we could just boycott Black Friday and the week before and after, which is the biggest retail spend of the year, we’d probably make a serious dent. They aren’t even good deals, but good luck convincing anyone to skip it who doesn’t already.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

I knew even before I opened the article it’s gonna be about fewer babies = fewer workers. Remember folks, when an article cites the “economy”, it just means the businesses and industries’ profits.

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[–] [email protected] 88 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Infinite growth is an absolutely insane bar to set for the economy.

The lowered birthrates are because we're getting ground into dust - my engineering team of twenty millennials has two folks with kids and two folks who openly plan on having kids... we're aging out of the window and it's not that we're trying and failing - most of us just don't want a fucking family. We're too fucking busy already.

[–] [email protected] 42 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Mental health never being addressed, so we're also too tired.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

"Burned outs just another word for not taking your bosses shit" - sing it to the tune of Me and Bobby McGee.

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[–] [email protected] 87 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Remember kids, "the economy" is double-speak for "record breaking profits for the rich".

[–] [email protected] 26 points 4 months ago

Personally, I always substitute it with "rich people's yacht money"

[–] [email protected] 82 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Half my life was spent fearing the result of limitless population growth and contemplating the inevitability of war and famine to shock population levels back down to sustainable levels. They warned us about this starting at least as far back as the sixties.

I see organic population collapse as a categorically good thing.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Long-term, possibly. But if the collapse happens too quickly it may cause a lot of issues. A slow steady decline would be best but may be difficult to achieve.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 4 months ago

The oligarchy is welcome to not poison people.

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[–] [email protected] 75 points 4 months ago (4 children)

There are more people in the world than ever before and we have folks writing news stories telling us there's a crisis building and that we need to have more kids?

They're farming us like ranch animals.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Infinite growth requires infinite bodies to feed it.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 months ago

Unfortunately I don't have infinite fucks to give

[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 months ago

I think our planet would be described as a free-range human labour farm, to anyone who was able to view it independently. Well, lots of it not so free-range. Its why they're coming for reproductive freedom. They're doing for the same reason a beef farmer wouldn't give their cows reproductive freedom.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 4 months ago (8 children)

Look at long term trends, population is already dropping in East Asia and Europe

Sure, there might be more people in Nigeria, but they are not paying into your retirement

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[–] [email protected] 60 points 4 months ago (1 children)

HEY WORLD LEADERS: make the world a less shitty place, so I don’t feel guilty about bringing a child into it, and I’ll rawdog more often. Do we have a deal?

[–] [email protected] 16 points 4 months ago
[–] [email protected] 52 points 4 months ago (5 children)

The problem with capitalism, is eventually you run out of other people's labor

[–] [email protected] 14 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Capitalism is just a complex pyramid scheme. Change my mind.

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[–] [email protected] 50 points 4 months ago (4 children)

In a world with too many humans already, can you imagine painting a drop in the birth rate as somehow a bad thing?

lol

[–] [email protected] 12 points 4 months ago (9 children)

I don’t really care about its impact on the economy, but I do feel for those who are attempting to have a child to no avail. I can only imagine how soul crushing that process can be.

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[–] [email protected] 48 points 4 months ago

The solution is obviously to take away womens' reproductive rights. Duh.

[–] [email protected] 44 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

Looks like not having kids in protest of how shitty things are is working. Everyone keep it up.

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[–] [email protected] 43 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Less people means less stress on the environment though.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 4 months ago (2 children)

And more houses, and more job opportunities.

We'll be.....the new people will be fine!

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[–] [email protected] 42 points 4 months ago (3 children)

The best way you can help fight climate change is to not have children.

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[–] [email protected] 40 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (2 children)

The world needs more babies.

Does it?

Or do we just need to embrace migrants?

“A reduction in the share of workers can lead to labor shortages, which may raise the bargaining power of employees and lift wages — all of which is ultimately inflationary,” Simona Paravani-Mellinghoff, managing director at BlackRock, wrote in an analysis last year.

"Have babies," said the billionaire, "or else who am I going to exploit in the future?"

[–] [email protected] 14 points 4 months ago

Or, better yet, do we need to embrace the idea that infinite growth isn’t possible, and adopt economic systems that do not rely on it?

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[–] [email protected] 27 points 4 months ago (2 children)

It is a basic math problem.. they keep raising housing prices ain't nobody going to have kids when 1500 in rent is due monthly

[–] [email protected] 14 points 4 months ago (1 children)

How is your rent so cheap?

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 months ago

$1500 a month? I wish!

[–] [email protected] 26 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Sounds awesome. Bring it on. Less people is better fuck the infinite growth economy

[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 months ago (4 children)

The problems listed in the article are real. we've built a system:

  1. Where a lot of economic growth stems from an increasing supply of (cheap) labour
  2. That relies on people of working age being able to financially support a retiree class.

Both of these are going to fall apart if the population stops growing. The smaller group of working age people won't be enough to support the amount of retirees, and without population growth there's no economic growth.

It's sad that economists correctly see all this coming but then conclude that the only solution is "make more babies." It's short term thinking almost by definition, because in the limit it's rather obvious that at some point we will not have the resources to support any more people. And the closer we get to that limit the less each individual person will have (even worse when wealth is not equally distributed).

Unfortunately I don't see any economist putting forth a plan that accepts population decline and alters the system to account for it. It wouldn't be easy but it seems no one is even trying.

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 4 months ago (2 children)

That means the supply of workers in many countries is quickly diminishing.

I thought AI was going to take our jobs.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Of course it is! We are simultaneously facing a labor shortage and mass unemployment. The important thing is to keep being angry and frightened, the specific subject you're angry about at any given time is flexible.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 4 months ago

Right? They must not think AI and automation can replace very many human laborers, otherwise they wouldn't consider declining birth rates to be such a crisis.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 4 months ago (7 children)

Turns out that whole idea of women being the primary bearers of hundred of years of exploited reproductive labor might have had some weight to it, huh.

All that labor being redirected into "L'economie" means that, at base, you'll have less children.

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 4 months ago

Many Boomers voted their progeny away when they put Reagan in office.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 4 months ago (8 children)

How is this a fertility issue? Are people unable to have children, or just unwilling?

[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 months ago (3 children)

Sperm motility issue rates are rising worldwide and I found out I was one of them this year. Mid 30s, waited to start a family while we went further in our careers. Now that we're ready, we got hit with this, fuck me for being responsible I guess.

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[–] [email protected] 16 points 4 months ago (1 children)

There's no economic reason the nominal GDP of any country or the world in general has to continuously increase. The important metric is per capita production. As long as people get continuously more productive through innovation, standards of living will continue to increase.

At the national level, vying for long term economic power in the world, a higher and younger population is going to be a huge advantage very soon and countries should be trying to get as many immigrants in their borders as they can. But instead they are...going a different direction.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 4 months ago

Does anybody think about the fact that every year on average 9-10 million people die every year from starvation and malnutrition related deaths. The vast majority of these numbers are children under 5 years old. The 9-10 million number was pre-covid. There was an uptick due to the supply chain issues. I think I read an article saying the number for 2021 was around 14 million. Again, mostly children.

It's mostly kids in 3rd world Africa, middle east, India, etc.

We over here need to have more kids though. Because profits.

Idk I just think all this is dumb. Fuck capitalism and the system we have. It's all fucked.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 4 months ago

Do not worry. When you refuse to live on in absolute poverty with children, your rukers will import those that will. The capitalist machine marches ON

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