It just seems like we could adjust our economy to compensate for a shrinking population. The answer of paying your working population more seems so much easier trying to get people to have kids they don’t want. It would also slow the population shrink by making children more affordable, but a smaller population seems far more sustainable than an ever growing one and a shrinking one seems like it should decrease suffering with the resources being less in demand.
In: 1173
It’s all about the market machine and nothing more, contrived and self-referential. It is true that within the confines of the rules of market economics, the board game structure, a system based on economic growth by default, levels of cyclical consumption, meaning repeat purchases and the creation of jobs and the distribution of purchasing power, must be maintained or increased in order to sideline job losses, degrowth, recession, depression and so on. And in this, the economy literally requires human reproduction as part of the growth equation because more people means more economic activity. And from the perspective of the system, the more the better. Because again, it is an infinite growth system. In systems theory parlance, this is referred to as a “reinforcing feedback loop,” a positive feedback loop, which has nothing to do with ‘positivity.’ It is a reinforcing structure. And the only thing a constant reinforcing feedback loop system can do is blow up.
And furthermore, if you’re thinking to yourself, well, this is hyperbolic, this can’t be right, we can’t have an entire economy that literally requires population growth. That’s clearly, intuitively insane. Well, the fact is this is old news and it’s been talked about in the scientific community, not the economic community. I direct your attention to [this Forbes article](https://www.forbes.com/sites/jeffmcmahon/2019/04/05/the-world-economy-is-a-pyramid-scheme-steven-chu-says/?sh=70c7c9a14f17) called “The World Economy as a Pyramid Scheme. Steven Chu says.” Nobel laureate scientist Steven Chu points this out and even expresses how economists ignore this reality. He highlights some nuance of the problem such as funding retirement through new young people being born and so on, along with the fact that governments are always pushing for population expansion, even if it’s through immigration. But beyond that, it just makes perfect sense from an agent-model standpoint. If you remove someone from the equation, they can’t perform an activity to contribute to the growth.
And as a brief aside since I’ve seen this counter and I wanna bring it up, I’ve actually read pro-market treatments that have the audacity to argue that population growth can actually be more sustainable because more people will come together with ideas to innovate technology and that technology can somehow further sustainable practices nullifying the environmental stress of the expanding species in the environment. Yes, that idea exists. This is one of those arguments against the “degrowth movement” and it’s truly disheartening, the kind of irrational mental gymnastics pro-market people will come up with, squirming to validate the way the system is. The completely stochastic notion that pumping more people into the world is gonna magically translate into innovations to increased sustainability. Nullifying the effects of increased population on the habitat, is so bizarre. It almost sounds plausible through the lens of idiotic market perception.
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