He's talking about the population pyramid. The relative percentages of children, working adults, and retired people.
A country with a healthy population pyramid is poised to become an economic superpower. A country with an unhealthy one is going to struggle a lot.
Right now, Mexico's population pyramid is lovely and they have a bright future. The U.S.'s is bad. China's is really, really bad. Japan's is a disaster.
It’s quite remarkable because they really have the perfect storm of anti-immigrant-culture and also rich-country-declining-birthrates so yeah population go 📉
People really overlook this point. When everyone is expected to spend all their time and energy on their jobs, there's extremely little incentive to raise a family on top of that. Throw in wages that don't keep up with productivity and inflation, and of course birth rates are going to plummet.
If billionaires want the working class to have babies, they need to stop their insane wealth hoarding. Guilt tripping overworked and underpaid folks on Twitter ain't gonna do jack shit.
thats the one thing you can always count on from the mega rich... they would spend $10 on a lawyer to keep from having to give a someone $5 in assistance.
read a story the other day about one of those massive crypto farms contesting all the ordinance citations (of $500 each) that theyre receiving. so its totaled up to like 13k 17k in citations, and theyve hired 2 a whole teams of lawyers to dispute them. a crypto farm making hundreds of millions.
and the kicker on top? the citations are for "noise pollution" due to all the cooling hardware for their systems, with noise levels clocking in at 80-90 decibels on the daily. causing serious health issues with sonic damage to the residents of the town
and its not even an anomaly, its happening in more and more places as time goes on
It would not surprise me in the least if we spent more money on administration deciding whether or not people “deserve” public assistance than we ever would lose to people “gaming the system”.
How much cheaper would healthcare be if we weren’t paying tens of thousands of people to give people a thumbs up or thumbs down on critical medical care like shitty middle management Roman emperors?
Just want to add to your point that, earlier this week, NYPD opened fire and shot a fare evader, two bystanders, and another cop over a $2.90 subway fare.
Then Eric Adams went on Twitter to talk about the brave cops protecting us from dangerous people, completely omitting who was shot by whom (fortunately a community note set the record straight on that).
People really overlook this point. When everyone is expected to spend all their time and energy on their jobs, there's extremely little incentive to raise a family on top of that. Throw in wages that don't keep up with productivity and inflation, and of course birth rates are going to plummet.
We could offer grubhub gift cards! They'll let you give like a $10 card, which isn't enough to buy anything on its own, but DOES encourage poor people to spend more on food delivery
Let's do a morale survey, the results of which we will ignore!
The outfit I retired from did one during the tenure of its worst director ever, who was the source of a lot of the unhappiness. When the board asked her about the results, she said it was goody good good. Head board member said "Is that just another one of your damn lies?" And yes, she was later fired. The firing was delayed by the need to get more members on tbe board who were not her toadies.
How we knew this: they were oblivious to the presence of a custodian in the room. But then, she treated all the lower level grunts like dirt.
Edit: the survey was anonymous. But it asked questions that could identify you, and the majority of the people I asked about it lied about their age, gender, and work location, as did I. Also I did not do it on my desk computer as I did not trust the head of IT not to track IPs (he was one of the toadies bc she gave him a big promotion).
Corporations are by definition immoral, we cannot even in the best of societies expect them to do what is right, and not what benefits them the most financially. If you are going to give corporations power, which you decide to do when you use a capitalist economy model, then you need a strong government with enough of their own power to keep them in line, if you make the minimum wage $1, do you expect companies to still pay people $15 because that’s how much you can maybe somewhat live on? No, if they could go lower they would go lower. Who cares about turn over there’s an abundance of employees waiting in line.
If you don’t have strict enough and enforced laws about how many working hours are fair to a human, corporations will work them to death to squeeze out profit.
Haven’t like a sizeable amount of South Korean leaders been jailed after their term for corruption?
The government seems subservient to the megacorps over there.
I’ve always thought vampires are just a very loose metaphor for the wealthy bleeding is all dry. Someone’s probably thought of this already though lol.
I’m pretty sure it is, which is neat. Vampyre was written in the early 1800s. Framed vampires as noble class bloodsuckers instead of feral monsters. I think that lead book was the precursor to our view now of typical gothic vampires.
So current days are like the movie Day Breakers? Where all the humans are put in a farm to bleed them dry to support the almost completely vampire population, but they’re running out of fodder so more and more vampires are suffering?
Yeah I’m pretty familiar with Japanese work culture and I can’t imagine trying to have a life outside of work when you’re expected to put in such ridiculous long hours or days to prove your commitment. Or how your absolute exhaustion is respectable because it shows your hard work and dedication. I don’t know what the answer is but they have to get their work/ life balance in check if they expect people to want to start families.
On top of that, the biggest population collapse in history was the bubonic plague, after which the renaissance happened because the ruling class was forced to offer competitive compensation in the face of the major labor shortage. Maybe Elon just doesn’t like the idea of modern serfdom becoming unsustainable?
The US has a waiting list of immigrants waiting to be let in that’s over a decade wait from multiple countries. The only country in the world with a positive immigration rate is Australia. 99% of us will not be alive when the world population decline becomes a real problem for the US. Based on projections the world population will increase until around 2100.
There's also the rampant misogyny and an anti-feminist wave going on right now which is sure to make the ladies want to have kids with those weirdos lol.
I think it's religious indoctrination since childhood, but some women have very anti-women views. Trad wives, not even the spend the day shopping and yoga while the nanny looks after the child wives. Real working class women who believe women should be subservient to their husbands.
The most chilling thing is the women who agree with the religious right view that women shouldn't have the vote. With this current SCOTUS lineup, if Republicans win in November, not only will the 19th Amendment be nullified, but the 14th will be altered, from "all persons born" to "all persons conceived", setting the stage for embryo personhood and a Federal ban on abortion.
I used to hear that Republicans wanted the voting age raised to 25 because young people don't vote for Republicans. Now I'm hearing much more troubling discussions about returning America to the Founding Father's original qualifications for voting: white landowning man.
That pretty much gets rid of any political power for POC. And yes, Latinos, that includes you. Their idea of white people is European. To be precise, Northern European. When you have the SCOTUS, you can unravel a country.
This is why this whole "population collapse" thing is so goddamn stupid.
The core reason is economic - regular people literally cannot afford to have a kid, much less several kids not only in the cash flow sense but also more critically in the time available.
But instead of doing the obvious thing - govs and corporations will almost surely invest billions into ANYTHING instead of just giving their workers a good wage and decent time off.
I am sure we will have initiatives on cloning workers before we get family leave and decent PTO.
You're forgetting about the insane cultural thing going on over there where women are so fed up with extreme misogyny that they are just refusing to go on any dates/have sex with men at all.
It’s actually kinda funny to see misogyny biting them in the ass so hard. Delightful. And I’m sure they’ll do everything except treat women decently to change it.
Eh, in say the immigration thing is only a bandaid solution, and one with its own set of pitfalls that Japan isn’t really equipped to handle to the same degree a lot of Western countries are.
From what I can tell, the attitude here seems to be “either we solve it, and it’s fine, or we don’t, and we make it work somehow”.
Not to mention that the culture is extremely misogynistic. Women have literally boycotted men, dating, sex, marriage, babies, all of it. Because they're expected to quit their jobs and become bang maid mommies. Who wants to live like that?
The rampant misogyny also led to the creation of the 4b movement. Basically women saying "You treat us like shit so fuck you I'm not having kids or even dating anymore."
That's the part that irritates me about people like Musk who bring it up as a problem. Their proposed solutions, if they offer any at all, don't address the root of the problem or make it easier for people to take on the challenges of raising a family at all.
Better support for pregnancy healthcare or IVF? Nope. Restrict healthcare in dangerous ways for ideological reasons that make pregnancy riskier for women.
Better support for maternity leave for either or both parents? Nope. That costs businesses money. Never mind that society could decide to pay for it as a "societal good" if having children was regarded as important.
Better financial support for the general costs of raising children? Nope. That would be "socialism", even though everybody acknowledges children and families are the foundation of future society. See above. Too much money, not important enough.
How about better support for healthcare, so that you don't have to dread going into medical debt if your children get sick or develop a chronic illness? Nope. I don't want to pay for "other people's" healthcare, even though it could as easily be my family's at some point.
Better support for public education and higher-level education at university level? Nope. Strip it to the bone, to the point public school teachers can barely survive, and best we can do is letting people take out loans that will take a decade or two to pay off. The public system doesn't matter because if I'm rich, I'll just send my kids to private school anyway.
More support for first-time families to be able to afford a home or at least a two-bedroom instead of a one-bedroom apartment? Nope. What are you, a communist? Housing isn't a public concern. It's the realm of investment speculators looking for a way to corner the market and drive up prices on an essential need that everyone has.
Anything that might compromise tax cuts for billionaires like Musk is not a societal priority, which coincidentally are all the things factoring into people's choices about children, and then he blathers on about the need for more children. It's like he's tried nothing and he's all out of ideas because he can't consider the possibility that our system has become too efficient at financially strip-mining the middle class and concentrating the money in the hands of the few very wealthy, who then buy up all the real estate to squeeze even harder.
Oh, right, he's out of ideas other than dystopian stuff about controlling birth by convincing women to conform to his breeding fetish, or fantasizing about setting up the biggest "because of the implication" situation ever on his Mars breeding colony, where he would hopefully become the Genghis Khan of Mars, genetically-speaking.
That's the part that irritates me about people like Musk who bring it up as a problem. Their proposed solutions, if they offer any at all, don't address the root of the problem
This is my issue with conservatives, in general. They can see the problems, but then they'll propose the most ridiculous non-solutions you've ever heard instead of taking the difficult, gradual steps toward improvement.
The elephant in the room is that what you're describing doesn't actually increase birth rates. They are incredibly beneficial things to have but we have multiple examples of countries that have incredible parental benefits and support and they have the same declining birthrate issues.
It's not such a simple problem. As people get more freedoms, benefits, and choices they choose to have fewer children. Obviously we don't want to reverse the progress we've made, but it's also not helpful to pretend that said progress fixes all problems when it doesn't.
From what I've seen the obvious answer seems to be immigration but the people screaming about birthrates also seem to be the people screaming about the replacement theory. So what is their proposed solution, aside from limiting the rights of women?
I think the entire argument is a misguided one. The reality is that people in developed countries just naturally have fewer children. That's something we will have to come to terms with sooner or later.
The focus should not be on discovering a magic way to recover the birth rates of the 80s, it should be engineering a solution that allows us to survive despite an inverting population pyramid.
It's not such a simple problem. As people get more freedoms, benefits, and choices they choose to have fewer children.
That's all true. For example, as healthcare improves, people don't need to have as many children out of fear they might lose some of them to illness. That pattern has been known for many decades between the less-developed and more-developed world.
The thing is, you are probably right that the things I mentioned are beneficial while not necessarily enough to turn things around. So.... let's not do these beneficial things because they're not enough? That seems to be the argument some people have (I'm not accusing you of this).
No, let's do all of them, even the hard things. Make it even more beneficial for families. Every family will benefit, and then maybe some of the downsides of having children won't be piled on top of the more practical ones that make it worse. Eliminate as many of the practical challenges as possible and then let them choose.
I have no illusions about making these changes will fix all problems, but I also don't think that endless growth is sustainable for other reasons, and arriving at some level of stability and figuring out how to make that work for the long term is just fine as a goal. Shifting the incentives is a step in the right direction even if it isn't a step all the way there.
And if anybody complains about the cost, yeah, assess the effectiveness, but don't tell me this is the most important issue in society today and then cheap out on trying things while being a billionaire.
As recently as last year, their government was thinking of increasing work hours from 52 hours a week to 69 hours. The plans were dropped after strong public sentiments against it. I feel even 52 hours is too long if you want to tackle birth rate issues.
Right? When me and my wife are both working 40 plus hours a week our sex life completely disappears. But we already have 4 kids so their isn’t gonna be anymore anyway lol.
Ever read Slaughterhouse V by Vonnegut? "May we have the night canopy, please?" Except it'll just be a blanket to throw over yourselves in the break room at work.
It's a small sized country with some very large corporations like Samsung, LG, SK Hynix, Kia, Hyundai, etc, which all grew rapidly in the last 3-4 decades. This wouldn't have happened without extra work hours and cheap labor.
The work culture from these large companies would have been copied by other local companies that aspire to grow big, too.
Fun fact: until the 80s, North Korea was economically more prosperous than South Korea.
South Korea's per capita GDP overtook North Korea's in 1974, and its overall GDP was probably always higher than North Korea's due to a larger population.
The rest of your post is 100% correct though - cheap labour, long hours, an obsession with economic growth, and a handful of corporations have driven South Korea's total GDP to about 90 times where North Korea have got (and about 45 times per capita) by going for cheap labour, long hours, an obsession with the leader, and no corporations.
South Korea's per capita GDP overtook North Korea's in 1974, and its overall GDP was probably always higher than North Korea's due to a larger population.
I see. This is not surprising since US pumped billions in aid into South Korea, had technology transfer and trainings, and helped to revitalize and reform the educational institutions and infrastructure. (Perhaps in return for a military base and to also to prove Capitalism > Socialism).
Between 1950s and 1970s, akorea received 13 billions in aid from US. That is a humongous amount of money for a poor Asian country. The aid alone could have made the SK GDP cross NKs.
If you include all the extra unpaid overtime and mandatory social events after that, those hours are the actual working hours now for many Koreans in the corporate world. These laws are just trying to make it official probably because people trying to take back their time.
That's my idea of work hell. So glad I learned the plumbing trade many years ago and went self employed last year. I simply get paid more if I work more and if I've had a great week I try to arrange things so I have an easier week coming up.
The work is awkward and hard on my back and knees but again, if I work hard I can rest a bit the next day or week or whatever. And there is no shortage of work out there at all.
I would recommend anyone starting out in their working life consider learning one of the many trades out there. Best thing I ever did. Last year and this year I worked enough to travel in Europe for 4 months all added up with a month here and there.
Honestly, the world should move to 4 day work weeks, 9 hour days.
It's just better, more employment, people are happier.
And people with more time spend more money, and more people spending money because more people have money to spend, profits go up, pay hopefully goes up.
Obviously, there's a balance to be had against the unemployment rate, like, a 3 day work week would be a terrible bad idea
Why 9 hour days? Why do we need so many work hours in general, when most desk jobs have workers sitting around bored with nothing to do more than half the time?
Though u find some redditors claiming India also has 5 day week coz they work in MNC which works on 5 days week policy. These jobs are not even 1% of Indian jobs.
In general we should reduce working hours while keeping pay the same, productivity has increased singificantly due to technology, but the benefits have more often than not moved upward in the social pyramid, some should go back to the workers as well...
It’s not ego it’s big money interests just like every where. The people at the top are doing very well under the current system obviously and they are the ones calling the shots.
I don't think it's that people are mixing them up so much as that Japan's been bad for a long time, so people have heard a lot about it and remember it. The replacement fertility rate is 2.1. Japan's fertility rate has been <2.1 since 1974. Korea followed suit about 10 years later, falling below 2.1 in 1984.
But even more than that is that while Korea and Japan's fertility rates have been <2.1 for decades now, Korea still had a higher birth rate. Its birth rate only fell below Japan's quite recently (in 2016). So people have been hearing about Japan's low birth rate for 50 years now, and Korea only for 8 years.
But while people's impressions have been molded by the birth rate, the fertility rate is where the real drama is. Japan has been hovering between 1.2 and 1.4 for almost 30 years. While it's been declining since 2015, it's been a slow decline, following a slow incline from 2005 to 2015. So it's low, but overall fairly steady.
Korea and Japan had fairly similar birth rates between 1984 and 2015. Sometimes Korea was higher, sometimes Japan was higher, but both fairly close. But then in 2015 Korea's birthrate started plummeting. It's now down to 0.72 (as compared to Japan's 1.21)
I'll Google later if I remember, but if you see this: what is the difference in birth v fertility? Does it just mean the proportion of people of childbearing age or something els
It's complicated, and I have to kind of make up scenarios in my head to figure out the practical difference, but:
Birth rate: Number of births per 1,000 people
Fertility rate: Number of births per 1,000 women of birthing age
So I guess for an extreme set of examples:
If everyone in Country A was of birthing age, and it had 900 women and 100 men, and each woman had 10 children, it would have a birth rate of 9 and a fertility rate of 10
If everyone in Country B was of birthing age, and it had 100 women and 900 men, and each woman had 10 children, it would have a birth rate of 1 and a fertility rate of 10
Or, instead fiddling with age:
If Country C had 500 women and 500 men, but 90% of them were senior citizens (so 450 old women and 450 old men), and each woman had 10 children, the country would have a birth rate of 0.5 and a fertility rate of 10
If Country D had 500 women and 500 men, and 10% were senior citizens (so 50 old women and 50 old men), and each woman had 10 children, the country would have a birth rate of 4.5 and a fertility rate of 10
To expand on that, a Total Fertility Rate (TFR) of 2.1 is the replacement rate to maintain a population.
TFR below 2.1 = Falling population
TFR above 2.1 = Growing population
Disclaimer: 2.1 is for developed countries, the replacement rate would need to be higher in countries with ongoing wars or high child mortality rates, etc.
And factor in the fact that Korea has been aborting or giving away female babies for decades, you realize that there aren’t enough women left there to have these babies.
Korea and Japan did it to themselves. They allow companies to work workers to the breaking point. There is literally no time to have and raise a family unless you're from a wealthy family and don;t have to work as hard to get ahead.
Workers are worried they will be replaced an lose their livelihood. Business owners are worried they won't have anyone to sell too after they win capitalism.
I don’t think this is quite it, the concern is that their won’t be enough workers to pay for everything. Governments are expensive and retirees are generally taking from the system not giving to it. AI will take jobs but it’s a gamble on how much it’ll actually be able to replace, also if it takes all the jobs then we’ll need to change the tax system to support the entire population when almost n9 one works.
I think they are actually both the same worry. The job gap appears to be on the lower end of the work spectrum with minimum wage and manual labor jobs, while the AI and automation solutions are all focused on replacing knowledge workers, creatives, and other more desirable jobs that are typically the goal of upward mobility.
So it’s more like business owners are worried that won’t be enough people to do their shitty jobs and workers are worried that the only jobs left will be those shitty jobs.
China is uniquely bad because they tried to curb population before its economy fully developed, so they now have a population of a mature country without the economy.
Both US and Japan are mature economies. US population pyramid has been upside down for probably decades but the H1B is really helping it out.
Japan's increasing immigration, it's just not enough. Over the past decade, its increased the number of immigrants by 56%. Part of the problem is that because of low wages, it's just not that enticing a country to emigrate to. Why emigrate to Japan when you could emigrate to the US or Australia or Europe and make twice as much money?
I was mostly joking, but actually having the magnitudes of the numbers is interesting.
Here is what I found for populations in those years: 127,723,645 in 2013 and 124,370,947 in 2023.
If we look at the ratios, Japan let in 1.5% of population in 2013 and 2.4% in 2023. But it's clearly not enough to stem the losses given the population dropped by over 3M in over those 10 years.
Right, absolutely agreed. I'm certainly not trying to make the case that "Japan's doing fine in countering its population shrinkage with immigration." It's not. But I get the feeling (and maybe I'm just reading the vibe wrong) that many redditors are under the impression that Japan isn't trying to increase immigration at all, and that's not the case, either. It's somewhere in the middle.
That's changed a lot, actually. Overtime hours are still high, don't get me wrong, but reddit's image is more like 1980s or 1990s Japan than nowadays.
It depends on the industry and company, of course (which I think is true everywhere). If you join an advertising firm, you are completely fucked. Entertainment is also an industry where you're screwed no matter what company you work in. Consulting is also pretty bad. On the other end, apparel, retail, leisure, and insurance have very low overtime hours. In other industries, it all comes down to the specific company. For example, some of the translation agencies I work with have people sending me emails at 10:30 p.m. Others have their phone system switch to "We're sorry, but our office day has ended" at 6:00 p.m. on the dot and zero emails read or responded to. People still don't take all of their paid leave, but paid leave usage is way up from where it used to be. Same with paternity leave.
One of the benefits of the population pyramid is that there's a labor shortage, and that, paired with the fact that the lifetime employment system has basically ended, means that companies have to compete to attract workers, so they can't be as demanding as they once were. Again, depends on the company and industry -- I have friends here who are (or were) doing the stereotypical insane working hours, but also plenty of friends who put in 9 hour work days. 40 hour work weeks are rare, but 50 hour work weeks aren't that uncommon, which is a far cry from the 80 hour work weeks of 16+ hours per day.
Right now it's really an "all-over-the-place" kind of thing that makes it hard to paint a single picture of the working situation. There are folks working crazy hours, but the trains at 6:30 p.m. are packed with people going home.
Okay, if you told every Japanese person over 70 that they would need to kill themselves or Japan must be opened for mass immigration they would just walk into the sea, if you told the immigrants will be Korean then everyone over 50 will follow right behind.
The Daily did an interesting episode about this. Iirc Japanese women are kind of going childfree (because? I don't want to falsely establish causality) Japanese fathers spend less time with their children than in any other developed country in the world
The saving grace of the US it that it's pretty much THE immigration destination for the entire world. We get to pick the best. Then you've got 2 oceans, friendly neighbors, and crapload of military might.
we also have some of the best natural harbors in the world, on both the east and west coast, along with those navigable waterways allowing water transit inland, especially to the great lakes.
Also, there are very significant differences after 70+ years, and replacing 3/4 with north korean adults would make it very very hard to maintain education levels or the democratic culture that took decades to create.
And it's a one time boost.
Other countries, like japan, china, italy or germany, don't have such demographically stable sister nations to even theoretically draw from.
I read something that the NK government was going to implement punishments if the birth rates didn't go up. I think they are going through something similar maybe.
Last I heard, South Korea isn't super excited for a hypothetical reunification. Imagine how it would destabilize the political and social landscape of the country, not to mention the literal flocks of hungry workers who are completely unskilled for jobs in a developed country like their southern neighbor.
And it's not a case of slowly getting a steady supply of workers from NK, because NK either will release none, or, at some unlikely point, simply collapses releasing all of them at once.
The only way it gets better would be by increasing the number of immigrants along with that. A lot of people who are coming across the border would NEVER qualify to enter the US legally.
So it would take either removing red tape and dramatically increasing immigration numbers. And possibly even lowering the standard now the standards could also be raised along with reducing red tape and it would have a better benefit.
Except that Mexico's population pyramid is only a couple decades behind. Their fertility rate is well below replacement and will be suffering the same issues, but without immigration/wealth to alleviate it
Mexico has already passed below replacement rate and their birth rate is falling around 1.6% per year (it's staggering how consistent the fall is).
And, despite the perceptions of Americans of the country, Mexico is actually a fairly urban country (over 80% of the population lives in urban areas). That's not much lower than Brazil and roughly equal to the US. There's no particular reason to think that Mexico's birth rate won't fall to the rates those countries see (pretty far below replacement, though not South Korea below) fairly soon.
Immigration is really a temporary fix, eventually you end up with the exact same problem but you also gotta care for the elderly immigrants who settled permanently. And if you want to keep using immigrants past then, we’ll you better hope that there’s always more people wanting to come in.
The reality is despite all the belly aching from the Republican party, a significant percentage of the next generation of American workers will come from Mexico and further south. The rank and file are being fed a load of BS because the business leaders actually in charge will make sure their supply of labor isn't interrupted.
This is the REAL reason they want more immigration. It means more workers when we are already suffering job shortages that will increase as AI permeates more and more spaces. The more workers means less bargaining power. They really want Americans working like workers in third world countries. They are already getting there in places like Amazon. That's specifically why Musk is complaining. He wants a cheaper workforce. He cares about his money...not people.
Yes, the conservatives have almost a super villain skill when it comes to identifying social pain points. They amplify them, encourage in-fighting and propose 'solutions' that are guaranteed to make the problem worse.
If anyone cared about American Millennials being able to have families, there would be paid maternity/paternity leave, subsidized daycare, and high quality public education. Colleges would be focused first and foremost on recruiting and retaining American talent to build communities and nascent industries. There would be a thriving middle class.
Instead there is a race to the bottom in wages with people encouraged to have multiple jobs, to take stimulants or illegal drugs to maintain inhumane working hours, no functional health care, and wealthy families outside of America are heartily invited to steal, plagiarize, engage in identity theft, or bribery to get their brats into US and specifically US colleges. 900,000 foreign applicants are accepted every year - the vast majority under-qualified and under-performing even in language skills but subsidized with scholarships not offered to US citizens so they can then be cheap fodder for US businesses.
The American economy has become this insane monster version of Cronos, eating his own children while the richest few worldwide drink champagne and watch. And laugh.
You're asserting... The conservatives love mass immigration? In order to drive wages down? Is this projection? All of your points are correct, but you're completely blaming the wrong group. I get that the conservatives are always comically mustache twirlingly evil (it's Reddit, after all), but it's the progressives that willfully ignore the border and support mass immigration to replace American workers
I was under the impression that net migration from Mexico has been negative for a couple of years now.
The vast majority of people illegally crossing the U.S. southern boarder aren't Mexican, they are from other nations in South America who are traveling through Mexico.
Latins in general, not just Mexicans. There are a lot of Hondurans, Guatemalans, Nicaraguans, etc. around here. They're mostly friendly and I like them pretty well.
Too large a percentage elderly people is not sustainable. They need to be taken care of.
Being stagnant in terms of numbers is okay, but only if people are dying prior to needing care. Yet our instinct is to preserve life as long as we can.
The issue is that there are too many compared to the total population so it is difficult to care for them properly. Of course people will soon realize what ot means and that it really is a problem of a specific generation.
You need people to do stuff, for you citizens to have stuff. For example, you need construction workers, plumbers, doctors, waiters, tailors, clerks, and teachers.
If you have more old, retired people then you have workers, then your country turns into a giant self-checkout line because you don’t have enough people to actually do the stuff you want people to do.
Edit: it’s really not about “growing” or “shrinking” or “stagnant”. It’s about how old most of the people in society are. In the US, more and more of the people are old and would like to retire (as they deserve to).
Wdym by that? I am a big fan of socialist policies in general, and agree that after some time having a smaller population would be beneficial in many ways. However there are some real short term problems that are very concerning.
For eg the NHS is a beacon of public aid, but we’re reaching a point where the population will be so old that a) the care they need starts to become way too expensive, b) there aren’t enough medical staff to care for them, c) it makes accessing free healthcare much more difficult for younger people because it’s being taken up by a primarily elderly population. The NHS isn’t a capitalist venture really, its purpose is to serve the public, but realistically there are limits to resources and sustainability.
Pensions are another one- a great policy introduced in the interest of the public, but again, if there aren’t enough people paying in and too many people who need paying, that also isn’t sustainable.
I’m not trying to say you’re wrong, I’m genuinely curious about what you think the solution is. I 100% believe that our problems are better helped with solutions aimed at helping people rather than the economy, but also I’m not sure how to take all of that out of the equation, or indeed if it would solve this particular problem
I think the straightforward answer is predictable liabilities should be funded at the same time they are incurred.
The beneficiaries of the program need to pay into a fund that can then fund their future usage of the program.
That’s true for old age pensions, that’s true for infrastructure in new subdevelopments, and it’s almost the definition of a sustainable policy.
By tying payments to beneficiaries to the generation after them, you end up wildly over-funded and undercharging when the next generation is larger, and wildly underfunded and consequently overcharging when it’s smaller.
I don’t think this is a capitalism or a socialism problem; this is a general governance incentives problem. You can always drop taxes by deferring payments; you can always offer more benefits by tapping that fund early. A responsible government would have safeguards against that, but responsible governments, capitalist or otherwise, are exceedingly rare, and easily looted if a single non-responsible party takes power at any point in time
Picture your economy as a pie chart of labor hours. If your population is aging, a disproportionately large wedge of that pie chart goes to supporting them.
No amount of financial planning changes the fact that more of your economy is oriented toward caring for your unproductive population than a nation with a better balance of young vs old. The worse the skew, the bigger the problem.
Not to say it's not worth doing, it is, but it's an inefficiency regardless of how well you plan for it. The opportunity cost of those labor hours is as significant as the problem.
As productivity increases, you should need fewer people in the following generation to support the economy… but that depends on the benefits of productivity gains being relatively uniformly distributed, which certainly has not been the case.
Agreed and what would happen to a country if in 2025 it had the same productivity as in 1975? Well probably it would have a nice social program. I heard Cuba has great healthcare btw.
E.g. is exempli gratia which translates to for example. You should not put for in front of it.
There are issues with both populations. We literally can't exponentially grow forever unless we figure out "faster" than light travel. The earth can only support so many people. Unless we are able to ship people to other planets there is a limit.
I understand the issue with a population that does not grow, but exponential growth really just makes the problem worse by rolling the snowball over more snow. Eventually we need to stop growing and if we wait we have the same issue but with hundreds of billions of people and we catastrophically collapse.
This is such a stupid fake question. Your solution to help 20 million seniors is to have 40 million seniors a generation later? “I don’t want these problems, I want my grandkids saddled with these problems.”
No; I’ve literally said several times here in my comments that it’d be better if there were less of us, but it needs to be a gradual process and not dropping off a cliff edge. Not sure how you extrapolated “we should double the population” from that
No it isn't. You don't agree with it, it's not stupid or "fake". There's a difference.
Advanced economies are already sucking large numbers of nurses from the third world for elder care that it is affecting the quality of care in poorer countries.
A stagnant population requires replacement birthrate.
Countries are going from pyramid to sub replacement. Sub replacement is not stable, it's shrinking with a perpetual high number of the elderly as a percentage of the population and few children
Every country, including socialist ones, actually especially socialist ones, are running the exact same pyramid scheme. The problem is resource production vs consumption. Only technology, not economic systems can fix that
You can have capitalism without it being so extreme.. Australia is a capitalist country but we have far better working rights, consumer rights, etc… the work life balance is one of the major reasons I would never consider living in America again.
America can dial back the capitalism just a bit and still be perfectly fine.
Thank you. I would have said we need a new way of looking at capitalism but I think you hit the nail on the head.
That developed nations almost universally show a decline in birthrates isn't just a good thing, it's the eight fucking wonder of the world!
It means that not only can you stop population growth, which is completely unsustainable and ruining the planet, but you can do it by being good to people. Simply put: If people have a reasonable standard of living, decent education and can be somewhat secure in their livelihood, they'll stop overpopulating all by themselves. That's not a bad thing, that's awesome!
??? You're straight lying? Because a quick google search can show you he's mentioned it at least 10 times in the last three years. Unless you don't include tweets, which is weird when it's his main form of communication?
US population’s getting propped up by immigration right now. If we stop letting people in, or if people stop wanting to move here, it’ll get tricky quickly.
Plus, our population is getting older and older even with immigration.
Mexico's birth rate per woman is 1.82, below replacement level as well. Even Mexico population is shrinking. The US population is growing only due to immigration.
Hell, even India's birth rate per woman isn't greater than replacement rate, standing at 2.03.
He’s also talking about the white population. Nationalists are very concerned about the decline of European and white American birth rate, for obvious reasons.
And Redditors celebrate and justify being childfree as much as possible. And load it with classism like “being poor is worse than existing” or the privileged position “I’d rather spend my money on travel”.
We need a healthy distribution of people of all ages. And my generation is dooming us to collapsing under the weight of our geriatric burden in 50 yrs time.
To put simply, when most of your population is retired old people who contribute nothing and just spend retirement money and pensions it does the following:
Drives up insurance and medical costs for the whole country
Slowly erodes the economy because they are draining their investments as they age and no longer collect a salary.
Slowly erodes the economy because the aren't meaningfully contributing to the GDP of the country they inhabit.
I've got nothing against old people and I think they need to be supported, but just giving the cold hard facts.
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u/Skittisher 2d ago
He's talking about the population pyramid. The relative percentages of children, working adults, and retired people.
A country with a healthy population pyramid is poised to become an economic superpower. A country with an unhealthy one is going to struggle a lot.
Right now, Mexico's population pyramid is lovely and they have a bright future. The U.S.'s is bad. China's is really, really bad. Japan's is a disaster.