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
Think of it like a giant Ponzi scheme.
Population growth is ‘needed’ so that the ones already here can have a better standard of living off the backs of the new-borns (once they get to working age) and the immigrants.
Nothing to do with capitalism or communism.
Everything to do with dependency ratio.
Also the question isn’t really reasonable. It’s not about a binary “population decline” vs “population expansion”… but more-so a ratio of many different factors including productivity, growth, etc.
In other words, you can turn a bunch of dials on society and different groups will likely suffer at different proportions.
We don’t. The top 1% needs workers to make money for them while being paid next to nothing. With advancements in technology we don’t need that many workers to keep society moving.
It’s not really a declining population exactly. It the fact that population decline (specifically when a result of low birth rates) causes there to be a disproportionately low amount of young and working age people.
Young to middle-aged people drive the economy (they produce and consume almost everything).
These comments read like recently graduated business majors from the 70s.
The only grasp on economics being from a century old textbook based in the pre-information age and pre-economic globalization, on countries with small populations and no possibility for technological advancements.
The 2nd half of this video talks about this (from 10:19). Very educational. The first half talks about the population and how much it is growing or shrinking.
You have two villages. One has a “growing” demographic: 60 workers, 30 kids, 10 retired people. Life in this village is awesome, a worker (farmer, mechanic, lawyer, whatever) needs to work enough for themselves and 60% extra to cover non working people. The trend is even more awesome for them in the future, so they can be even richer in retirement while the future workers can both themselves be richer while giving less. Say 50 kids 100 workers, 15 retired people.
Village two has 40 workers, 10 kids, and 50 retired people. Thing here suck. You have to work 250% more to cover non workers. But that is nothing, the really, really awful times have yet to come. When you retire their will be even less workers, with less to go around to cover more retirees.You will be dramatically poorer in the future.
Sure, technology has some offsets, but which of the two above villages can invest in technology?
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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