It’s a crisis for who will support you in your old age. Capitalism or no capitalism, if you want to keep eating after you stop working, either you store enough literal food in your barn, or somebody else works so you eat.
Traditionally, that’s family: your children. Capital/investments/savings, or socialised care, spreads that around the State a bit more (or round the local or global community). But when there are few children and many adults, later there are few working people and many retirees wanting to enjoy life - and you’re one of the retirees.
It’s a “problem for capitalism” because so many people have invested in capitalism for their retirement, and that could be upended. And because actually-small investments were made, on the basis that constant economic growth means lots will be returned when the time comes.
But it’s a “problem for humanity” - all the people who don’t have children to care for them and rely on money and financial investments - which both just represent a stake in someone else’s work - for the future.
I’ve written myself into a corner a bit here. Few working adults to many retirees is always going to be difficult, no matter your economic/political system. But logically from my, simplified, argument, the last two paragraphs beckon a third. To recap,
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Retirement funds: a stake in “Capitalism”, to provide for your retirement based on broad economic growth
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Money: a stake in the total economy, to provide from people’s work. Then:
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A stake in the community, based on being a member of the community. E.g. a citizen - then this is socialism. If there are enough working adults - or bread in the barn - to provide for all the elderly, then all the elderly (you included) are provided for, regardless of whether they have children or saved money or made investments.
But still, if there isn’t enough for everyone, everyone suffers. And it’s rare to find a community that really wants to care for its elders well, putting in the effort for them rather than people spending on themselves, without outsourcing to ‘capitalism’ and economic growth.
Your problem is twofold.
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We need people working services, among which elderly care is going to be big, and producing all the stuff the existing people need.
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You keep working with money. Money is a great idea for a society where everyone is supposed to be productive. But not so great beyond that. When you inevitably move to a society where loads of people are not productive because of age and automation, money becomes an obstacle rather than an asset.
Given the limited amount of people needed to provide services and produce with the current and near future level of automation the only problem is money. Because money means that only people who earn it have rights to goods and services.
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And a medium term crisis for elderly care
It usually always translates to “We really need more poor and working class labor so pump out more wage slaves.” We could be a way better society if we move past enriching billionaires and the rich.
They are kind of a crisis for pensions, mind. The whole idea of a state pension is that for every worker there are approximately two more paying in to cover the costs of the pensions. Every generation is paying the pensions of the previous generation. Obviously it’s actually less than two because of tax brackets and the fact that people die early, but on the whole, it’s roughly two people.
If population declines, well you’re gonna have to re-think your pensions and social care and find the money and/or labour somehow.
Oh no, not a reform of the ponzi scheme known as the pension system, the only solution is that we forcibly breed humans so that we have someone to pay taxes.
Billionaires are always welcome to pay their fair share of the tax burden by paying their employees a wage they can live on. Higher wages means more taxable income. Their current policy of, “privatize the profits and socialize the risks” benefits no one but themselves.
OK - hear me out.
https://muppet.fandom.com/wiki/Hurling_Day
Yeah, capitalism sucks - but the greying population is an issue all the younger gens have to deal with. Once again the problem is boomers (not their fault for being born though). Thankfully, Jim Henson gave us a solution.
Holy crap I forgot about this. Reminds me of Midsommer. I think I also read about this ritual in “The Golden Bough.”, but it’s been awhile.
no. It would take a far larger imbalance in the population for it to be truly unmanageable. The real danger is not to the labor we can do, but the security of the empire we may live in. Other empires might exploit the lack of fighting age citizens, and this isn’t a fabricated threat. Invasion from more “efficient” empire is a constant consideration that requires a sizable younger population to guard against.
However, this isn’t a problem inherent to every society that could ever exist, only constantly reinforced by the desires of systems and people to conquer and dominate.
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maybe tell them to pay the trillions they have paid in the last few decade. and wasting money on the oversized budget of defense.
Capitalism can exist on a gold standard, or a barter system of goods, which if we were on those systems then a shrinking population would do nothing inherently negative.
The thing that breaks with a declining birth rate is monetary policy, which requires an ever growing money supply because we’ve designed a 2% inflation target, which means growing consumption via debt monetization. The reason for 2% inflation is to monetize our debt, in order to force people onto the risk curve for economic growth; we grow the money supply about 6% a year to achieve 2% inflation due to technological advances and a broken CPI index.
Humans are the most overabundant resource on the planet…if capitalism actually functioned, the system wouldn’t incentivize creating more.
But the current economic system isn’t even true capitalism…it’s optimized wage enslavement paired with a caste system. Keeping labor pools well stocked depresses the value of replacing individual units…all they’re figuring out now is how best to trim maintenance costs.
And even more specifically, hyper consumerism-driven, wasteful capitalism more than just capitalism itself.
Well regulated and not utterly greed-driven capitalism that gets fairly taxed to support the societies infrastructure that it feeds off is not so bad. If that would ever happen.
I don’t think “not so bad” is the best phrase for that. Not as bad, certainly, but I have a difficult time saying “not so bad” about any kind of capitalism that isn’t already transforming into something like market socialism.
If that would ever happen.
Well, you see, the thing about capitalism is it empowers exactly the people who don’t want that to happen. Consumerism-driven, wasteful capitalism is the in-built trend of capitalism itself, not an unfortunate variant - even government regulation doesn’t solve these problems.
True that. Sociopaths always win. This is pretty much true of any form of society though.
With the introduction of automation every decade (currently AI is the big one), unemployment rates will go up so we don’t even need as many working. Our capitalist brains just can’t fathom “handing out” extra resources.
Every automation brought more work, rather than less. Why? Because profit. If the boss owner can get more out of less people, they will fire the unneeded workers, bring prices down and force the competition to either follow or close down
That’s not exactly true though. With excess, we’ve increased the needs and wants of individuals and scaled production to match. We could easily provide the same amount as before with less people, but every generation is leveraging the growth of the previous generation. Once we don’t grow in one generation, we’ll plateau and we won’t be ready for it. It’ll be the social version of an economic recession.
It’s more work because the company continues to operate like before and just piles more into it instead of looking at the overall work and removing things that aren’t necessary, and reorganizing operations/back office.
I’d call that pile on of more work productivity. If you can get 20 blankets a day with automation instead of 20 a month without, and they’re of similar quality, then why wouldn’t you?
Now you put automation in front of a good coder and all the sudden that video game that used to take 5 years to make, only takes a year. Again, all good if you can approach similar quality.
Back 500 years ago, only the wealthiest could afford a fine blanket and it would take ages to produce. Nowadays anyone can purchase one at their preferred store. Automation has increased productivity and thus democratized purchasing power.
There are still billions on this planet that struggle to survive. Billions we could potentially pull out of poverty. Why stop the automation train now when the tracks show that we have further to go?
The question becomes: why are so many people still unable to afford such basic amenities, while a handful of individuals have enough wealth to sustain all of those poors for years?
So phuck but use a condom.
Lots of gay sex. Lots and lots. Daylight’s burning folks.
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I’m proud to do my part. 🏳️🌈🫡
Captialism can cause low birth rate, but no economic system can survive the decimation of the prime-aged working class.
Even china’s seeing low birth rates, but they have a bit more padding.
china is already freaking out over it, trying to do things to “make people have sex more”/
Their population is poised to half by 2100 leaving them with something like 80 or 90% less young people.
South Korea’s set to implode by then. 96% less young people.
In so many of the contrarian responses I’m seeing, I’m reminded of Fisher:
it’s easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism.
That is to say that so many cannot escape the capitalist framework of productive workers supporting the elderly. As though that’s the only way society can possibly be organized.
Retirees are not seen as deserving of their reward, but rather a drain on productive labor. It’s no wonder that there is so little sympathy for the destitute and homeless when those who’ve “earned” their leisure are still known as parasites.
How do you imagine a world of caring for those who cannot care for themselves without people to care for them?
Economies become ever more productive with new technology. Currently that surplus goes to raising standards of living, primarily the standard of living of the wealthy. The surplus productivity of new technology can instead be directed at providing the same standard of living, but at reduced labor participation rates. So maybe we stop making our homes and vehicles ever-larger. Oh well. We’ll survive and thrive just fine. I would much rather have that than any attempts to coerce people into having children.
We have the people and resources to care for the old.
Nobody wants to care for the old because it doesn’t reward you with enough money to live off of.
I think a better question is how will we care for the old when we force people to work bullshit jobs that aren’t as important just so they can have a life worth living?
We’re talking about population decline, not disappearance.
All they say is that decline is only a problem in capitalism
In a socialist utopia that means a larger burden for the population to share which leads to further population decline
They never mentioned how they would remedy that and neither did you
Ok, I’d remedy that by not giving all the wealth to the wealthy, and transfering it to the caring progefessions and to the retirees themselves, so that they could live a devent life.
Ok but money in and of itself doesn’t mean anything. Just giving away all of the wealth doesn’t inherently fix the lack of labour. You can make everyone a millionaire but it doesn’t matter if they don’t have anything to buy with that money.
I don’t believe a reasonable population decline would mean such a severe shortage of labour that there would be nothing to buy. I think we could actually make a shorter week or shorter hours happen without big problems.
We have plenty of labor, they are literally removing workers from the country. They keep coming up with new ways to prevent workers from entering the country. Unemployment rate has been a cool 4% for years now, the only thing wrong with the labor pool is their purchasing power.
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Sounds catchy, but I’m not sure this is really true. Capitalism is about owning things, not selling things.
Capitalism is fine with it actually.
The issue is that there will be too many old people and not enough young people to support them.
But old people have most of the money. So, lots of money will still be spent. Capitalism will be fine. Sure, some old people will have no money and bankrupt their children. But capitalism does not care about that.
It would have been a bigger problem before AI and robotics. But capitalism will shrink the workforce faster than birth rates.
You can’t bankrupt your children lmaoo just toss em in the wood chipper, or hand them over to the state. They won’t be leaving much behind but you can’t bankrupt your kids just by existing
