Global Birthrate Decline

[RE]

I've been pondering more on the plummeting birthrate, which I have argued comes primarily from the economic cost of raising children.  However, I had an epiphany thinking about what kids do in our society, which is essentially nothing for the first 18 years of their lives.  They are the epitome of Winston Churchill's supply of "useless eaters".  Not only do they cost money to raise, they don't earn any money either.  In fact our society makes it explicitly illegal to have children work.  If you do put them to work, it's considered "exploitation of child labor".

In both our prior forms of social organization, hunter-gatherer and agriculture, children had clear economic benefits and began to pay their own way as soon as they were weaned and could walk.  They followed their mothers and dug up roots, they picked berries, they killed rabbits and squirrels throwing rocks at them or chasing them into traps.  Of course that food still was supplemented by some of the meat from the big kills of the older hunters, but they were 3rd down the list getting their portions after the hunters and the women.  They got the leftovers.

On the farm they milked the cows, churned the butter, gleaned the wheat fields, planted and dug up potatoes, washed clothes  etc.  In those days "doing your chores" didn't just mean taking the trash out to the curb, loading the dishwasher or washing the car.  You really hadda WORK as a kid back in those days.  Cinderella's evil stepmother was probably fairly typical of the era, you didn't take in somebody else's kid and not expect to get some work out of them.

The beginning of the industrial era was of course notorious for its use of child labor.  In the Dickens era, orphans were sent to Workhouses to do some factory task 12 hours a day, then when given a bowl of gruel to eat by the workhouse boss and Oliver asked "Please, sir, can I have another?", Fagin would just laugh.

In fact many of those kids weren't really orphans, they had simply been abandoned by their parents who weren't being paid enough to afford to feed them.  Once abandoned by their parents, they became a cheap source of labor for the capitalist.  They literally would "work for food".  At this point in history, whatever profit there was in making children was transferred from the parents to the capitalists.

The one profit there was in having children in the early years of the industrial evolution was as an insurance policy for your old age.  If you could successfully raise them and get them educated, you could hope for them to do better than you and take care of you in your dotage.  As time went by though, mobility increased, children moved away and basically you just saw them on holidays.  The state took over the job of caring for old people, sort of.

The real killer though was women having to join the workforce in order to have enough money to buy a house and raise kids.  This led not only to fewer kids being born, but starting in the 70s generations of "latchkey" kids who had both parents working and had empty houses to go home to and little to do besides get in trouble.  The family disintegrated, and the kids became harder and harder to teach in school when they were there.  The good schools and after school activities all cost money, and needed somebody to drive the kids around to soccer practice or dance class.  To afford this lifestyle, the parents had to be in the top 20% of wage earners, the average salary just paid enough for the basics.

Upon graduating, the generations after the Boomers have NOT been doing economically better than their parents, and instead of being a help to aging parents, they have instead become a continuing financial drain well into their adult years.  They continue living at home into their 20s and 30s, and parents have to supplement their low wage jobs giving them money.

Essentially, by bringing women into the capitalist workforce, it was the human equivalent of "eating the seed corn".  The women aren't breeding up the next generation of workers because there is no profit in it for them to do so.  All the profit of raising an adult to become a worker goes to the capitalist, all the cost of raising them goes to the parents.  Now capitalists like Elon Musk are all in a tizzy about this and are trying to convince people it's their moral responsibility to have kids.  They aren't picking up the cost of raising them though in any meaningful fashion.  A few tax credits and subsidized child care isn't going to cut it.

The only way people will start having more kids in a capitalist system is if they are paid to have them.  All the costs of health care for birthing, all the costs of food and housing and education until they are old enough where the law allows them to work for their food and shelter.  If the kids stay with the parents, they should be paid a monthly child care fee.  Otherwise, the capitalist can buy the child for a one time fee and run his own child care facility and pay professionals to raise the kids communally.

Elon of course is trying to single handedly make enough kids to fill up his future workers factory.  Sadly for him, even if he fathers a few hundred with his A-list Vagina concubines, he can only make enough to fill vacancies in the executive offices.  He needs 100X that number though for them to boss around, so he needs to pay for them also.  Otherwise he has only himself to blame when he can't find staff for his battery factories or consumers to buy his Teslas.

https://www.ft.com/content/444a637b-9712-475b-8c14-9b147f4ff244

South Korea's birth rate has become a national emergency

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[RE]

I am getting teary eyed and nostalgic for the teenage hippies flooding the streets of Haight-Asbury in San Fransisco in the Summer of Love in 1967 and clogging the NYS Thruway with VW Buses with hand painted Peace signs on the way to the Love-In at Woodstock in the Summer of '69.  I just missed being a teenager in the 60's, I was 12 in the Summer of 69.  But I was more grown up than the typical 12 year old, particularly in my radical left wing politics and my even stronger belief in the principles of Free Love.  No girl in a mini skirt above the 3rd Grade with nice legs and a pretty face escaped getting a badly written love poem handed to her at recess. Fortunately the quality of the writing wasn't important, just having the guts to write invitations to play doctor with me worked like magic. Sex & Drugs & Rock n' Roll!  I wasn't just a precocious math prodigy. lol.  As Bryan Adams sang, those were the best days of my life. 

https://www.newsweek.com/america-teenage-population-shrinking-1877210

America's Teenage Population is Shrinking

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[RE]

One of the more comprehensive treatments of the Depopulation problem Elon Musk is so panicked about and seeking to solve himself by impregnating as many A-list Vaginas augmented with fertility drugs as he can, but still IMHO under-estimating how rapidly the population will drop once the energy to produce FF based fertilizers becomes in short supply, unavailable or too costly to produce food for billins of "Useless Eaters".  At some point in the next 20-30 years if not sooner, between climate change, depleted topsoil and subterrainean aquifers, and/or monoculture crop failures due to blight, along with the lack of fertilizer we will run into a global famine that will wipe out 1/2 the global population of Homo Saps in a single growing season.  The resulting anarchy and failure of transportation systems and energy production and delivery systems will wipe out 1/2 again the following year, and this rapid exponential collapse will look like the collapse of the deer population on St. Matthews Island.  By the time this cascade stops in 5-10 years, the remaining population across the globe will likely be perhaps .01% of the peak population when it begins, say 1 in ten thousand will make it through the population bottleneck.  So if we start at 8B, we end this at 800,000 human souls still walking the earth before we might begin to stabilize and rebound.  Or we might just keep on going until the last surviving Breeding Pair of homo saps dies 10-20 years later and we go the way of the dinosaur and dodo bird.  If I do last until this cascade begins, I'm sure to go in the first few weeks when the food runs out and the CNAs carve me up for dinner, at my request.  All I ask is that they make it quick and as painless as possible.

The falling birthrate math is just a mind of pacifying propaganda to let people believe that we'l disappear peacefully and quietly, slowly drifting off into the sunset because we don't breed enough replacements, not because we'll start dying by the truckload, and they will be one of the people scrounging for food or eating their parents or kids at the end.  The likelihood that we go slowly into this good night is very small.

A little hopium though keeps the people from panicking and the Children of Men scenario from starting too soon.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2024-03-10/global-population-collapse-isn-t-sci-fi-anymore-niall-ferguson

Global Population Crash Isn't Sci-Fi Anymore

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[K-Dog]

The falling birthrate math is just a mind of pacifying propaganda to let people believe that we'll disappear peacefully and quietly.

Yeah, lets just forget about needing seven Earth equivalents to supply the material needs of the current population.  When people start worrying about shit that matters, they have to be redirected.  Falling birthrate worries is a thought virus intended to pacify the sheep.

[RE]

I love the way these articles run down a long list of the reasons why Industriaized countries have falling birthrates, with some like Italy producing nearly half the number required for replacement level and a stable population size without immigration.  The implication being that it's a complex problem with many causes, and money alone can't solve it.  The reality is, money can solve it, just not the piddling amount being dished out in tax credits or in subsidzed child care for working mothers.

Every single country can trace its falling birthrate to the same point in history.  The 1960s & 1970s, when women were "Liberated" from their role as Housewife & Mother and "free" to go out into the working world with their husbands and pursue their career ambitions, albeit at a generally lower rate of pay and a glass ceiling to how far up the corporate ladder they could climb until fairly recently, where pay scales have come closer to parity but women still dominate the lower paid jobs and professions.

The fact is that despite TV shows featuring Super Moms who can do it all, run their own law practice, raise a big family, have a hot husband who love them and fucks them silly every night instead of his oldest daughter's best friend, run's marathons and has her own side action boyfriend, her son's best buddy who is Quarterback of the Varsity football team and also fucks her brains out in the back of the minivan she uses to drop the younger siblings off at little league and dance practice is complete fantasy.  Her beautiful suburban McMansion is always spotless, even if she doesn't employ undocumented Nicaraguan maids and a Mexican gardener.  The family sits down to breakfast and dinner together, and her eggs are cooked to perfection just the way each of them likes, and she gets her dinner recipes from Gordon Ramsey videos she watches on her cell phone while eating lunch she prepared foor each kid and hubby before going to bed and getting her brain fucked out again.  Women who can't pull this bullshit off are substandard failures to God and Country, not producing enough cheap labor to buy Teslas with loans they can' afford.

The fact is, statistically speaking, raising a large family with more than 2 kids is incompatible with both parents working, and besides not getting pregnant often enough, is in large part responsible for the divorce rate, which also began climbing to over 50% in the aftermath of 1960s and the social revolution of Women's Liberation.  Women weren';'t liberated at all, they were enslaved along with men in the service of capitalism, and the only way to earn enough money to afford the McMansion and Carz and Hawaii vacations they aspired to was to both work.  They learnd quickly they had neither time or energy to raise more than 1 child, much less 2 or more.  When the bill for college came around 18 years later, the only way to afford it was to take out a second mortgage on the McMansion, or else consign their son or daughter to a decade or more paying off their education before even being able to think about marriage, let alone kids.

Since the 1970s, we've gone through 3 more generations of this, each time getting worse than the generation before.   This is not complicated, and money can solve it.  Just the money needs to be at minimum equal to a full time job, and that just pays for her time.  To afford all the stuff each kid needs, like braces and piano lesson and the travel soccer team to live the Amerikan Dream, the job needs to pay o Doctor's salary too.   t's an economic impossibility, there aren't enough high paying jobs out there for that to happen for any more than the top 1% of wage earners in the country.

This reality can't be admitted though, so we get this non stop stream of bullshit articles telling us how complicated the problem is, and it's really nobody's fault that SS will be bankrupt by 2035.  The latest generation is resigned to this, and they really don't care if they learn to read or add and subtract.  It's a waste of time, they'll be working the same min wage jobs no matter how hrd they study.  They'll never get to retire, they'll have to work until they drop dead.  Except for the 1% of course.  At least until SHTF Day arrives.  then everybody will be in a world of shit.

https://fortune.com/europe/2024/03/11/italian-women-eschewing-motherhood-italy-birth-rate-plunges-europes-lowest/

Italian women are eschewing motherhood as Italy's birth rate plunges to one of Europe's lowest

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[RE]

So now the CCP is trying to encourage Chinese women to return to being barefoot and pregnant, and letting men go work on the Foxconn production line assembling Apple I-phones and computers to feed the family.  Which might work IF there were enough of those jobs for the population of unemployed Chine men, IF those jobs paid enough that a single salary could support more than just themselves, much less a wife and a 1 bedroom apartment stuffed with a brood of rug rats sleeping in the living room, and IF there were enough Chinese women to marry those Chinese men, which there aren't because after decades of selective abortions to eliminate unwanted girl babies in favor of boy babies there are 36M more men than women running around the polluted countryside.  Since none of those conditional statements is true, it's not gong to work.  So, they also want to limit abortions and limit vasectomies to further improve the statistical probability of sex between men & women will result in a live birth 9 months later, which also won't work because they're not interested much in having sex these days.  Fucking isn't nearly as much fun as playing games on the phone and watching porn for a fulfilling sex life.

The only ting so far not on the table seems to be making impregnation obligatory for all girls graduating HS, and return visits to the impregnation clinic obligatory after each birth until the female Chinese Communist Party Member has fulfilled her duty to pop 4 buns out of the oven minimum before being retired as a worker baby factory.  For the CCP with its history of trying to legislate birthrate with the 1 child policy, this isn't that far fetched, but it is slightly harder to make pregnancy obligatory than it is to limit reproduction.  Besides which, even if it was successful, the question of where the money would come from to raise all these new babies into worker bees remains a mystery.

The demographic problem of where they are going to find enough Chinese CNAs and PCAs to take care of all the aging Chinese factory workers whose eyesight has become too poor to do the assembly on the I phones is going t hit here long before the population is cut in half by the end of the century, unless of course old people start dieing off a lot quicker, which seems likely.

Of course, this is not just China's problem, just about every industrialized country has this problem now, so it's just a matter of time before the lack of young workers to support elderly homo saps reaches critical mass.  I don't think it will take until December 31st, 2099 for this to occur.

https://www.newsweek.com/how-china-tackling-population-crisis-1879563

How China Is Tackling a Population Crisis

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[K-Dog]

The country's aging workforce and its "uber-low fertility level" are of particular concern for the future of the country and its financial sustainability, Greenhalgh said, as they might contribute to a potential labor shortage.

One thing all capitalists agree on is the need for a reserve army of labor.  Positive benefits of a smaller population will not be discussed in mainstream media.  Brainwashing on this issued is complete, and all good state puppies will bark down anyone who suggests that there are limits to growth.

Useless eaters can't support their lifestyles of exploitation if limits are paid attention to.

Overpopulation means there is a lot of cake to pass around.  Until there is not.  Concern about the loss of (profit) because an empowered work force is demanding their share of cake makes people like Susan Greenhalgh at the top of the food chain at Harvard say, You want me to jump?

How high do you want me to jump?

All they can envision in their PHD stupidity is endless growth.  Resolving system contradictions leading to prosperity for all is NOT ON THEIR AGENDA. 

Perfection for these hopeless capitalists is in a pie in the sky future which ignores the suffering of the world now.  They are deluded utopians who say there always must be poor people.  It is a feature of their system.  If you do not have poor people, rich people can't be rich is their unconscious mantra. 

A mantra they will never admit to.  Even to themselves.

[RE]

Nippon was once called the Land of the Rising Sun.  Not anymore.  The Japanese are in the process of committing ethnic Seppuku as they die off at the rate of almost 100 Samurai/hour.

For years the Japanese, possibly the most xenophobic culture on earth, refused any foreign workers.  Now the only thing keeping the country barely functional is immigration.  Who wants to immigrate to a country though who think everyone else on earth is beneath them in cities like Tokyo where the Micro-aoartment has been considered decennt living conditions for young workers since the 1980s?  You wonder why the birthrate is in the basement?  Who's going to bring home a girl to an apartment like this, or worse, what girl would agree to go? 



At least the dead ones don't have to pay off their national debt.

https://www.ft.com/content/21b8a049-c752-4450-84de-5052c8632d7c

Japan's native population declines at record rate as births plunge

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The Greeks are getting it from both ends, and I'm not talking about sex in this case.  Apparently besides having fewer new Greeks (either resulting from less sex or choosing the wrong hole), they also have an increasing death rate from "healthy" young people due to Heart failure and cancer.  Exactly how they are considered "healthy" with these medical problems I can't say?

The IMF is very worried since this means falling tax revenue will make the remaining Greeks unable to pay their debts, and Elon Musk is concerned he won't have any riders hailing his Robotaxis around the Acropolis.  Bars & Restaurants around the world are concerned because they wonder who will pick the olives for the Martinis and salad dressing?

As we are well aware by now, this is a pan-European problem, along with Japan, China and just about everywhere besides sub-Saharan Africa.  Also at this point like climate change it's basically irreversible, so other than moaning about it, nobody really has any effective solution for the problem.  Besides that though, nobody addresses how the obvious problems that come along with the depopullation are going to be handled?  What will they do when the pension funds all go insolvent?  What will they do when there aren't enough HS graduates to draft as cannon fodder?

The clock is ticking.

https://www.wionews.com/world/greece-prepares-for-population-collapse-amid-rising-deaths-potentially-1st-country-to-face-such-crisis-711619

Greece prepares for 'population collapse' amid rising deaths, potentially 1st country to face such crisis

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[RE]

Ad I am sure Diners are aware although typical J6P is not, projections of this sort made by UN statisticians and demographers are loaded with assumptions that BAU will continue over the next 25 & 75 years.  They assume current rates of decline will continue along in a smooth curve that can be modeled as a mathematical function.  they don't account for "black swan" events like Global Thermonuclear War, global famine or a global pandemic that actually kills a significant number of the people it infects, unlike COVID or flu pandemics with relatively low mortality rates.

They also assume that we'll continue to supply enough energy to the population to maintain these rates through the entire timespan, which is unlikely.  All of which makes any projection that goes more than 10 years ahead is practically worthless.  Maybe the 2050 projections will be in the ballpark without a black swan landing in the next 25 years, but the likelihood we make it to 2100 under 2024 BAU conditions is vanishingly small.

Still, the charts are nice to look at as a "best case" scenario.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-13309391/Mesmerising-charts-worlds-populated-countries-time-Britain-slipped-rankings-20.html

Mesmerising charts show world's most and least populated countries over time - and how Britain has slipped down the rankings and out of the top 20

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[K-Dog]

This from MSN:

Immigration advocates see work permits as Biden's best option

President Biden's left flank is pushing for expanded work permits for immigrants living in the country illegally, not just as a humanitarian imperative, but as a political boon ahead of November.

A second class citizen is a humanitarian imperative?  According to Microsoft it is.  And Microsoft should know.  They import thousands of workers and displace Americans in the process.

I should know.  I was in their system.  I worked next to the techies Microsoft flew in.  We had the same kind of badge.  Microsoft has been doing this for decades.  They have imperialism down.  Microsoft has game.

From the article, not much to it.  The article could be in the Idiocracy movie.

Recent polling shows that two-thirds of voters in swing states support expanding work permits for undocumented immigrants, including long-term workers, farmworkers, Dreamers without DACA and spouses of U.S. citizens,

Did you see the hat trick.  I put it in bold.  What is the truth.  I need my decoder ring.  If I don't decode this, I might want to sign on and go with the flow.  Would I be peaceful and smile?

A minority of Americans are not in favor of second class citizen workers, but if we can include that group in a larger group of long-term workers, farmworkers, Dreamers without DACA and spouses of U.S. citizens which we mostly agree on should be citizens then we can spin our * liberal propaganda the way we wish.

I work with a DACA kid.  He has been here since he was four years old.  His sister married an American and finally got permanent residency after being married for 8 years.  My friend is from Indiana, not Mexico.  The parents still work in a factory somewhere in the Midwest.  They should all be American citizens.

Microsoft drew the circle large enough to get the result they want.  A circle drawn so large that 'humanitarian profit' makes sense.  Propaganda a company that has practiced industrial imperialism using guest workers for decades knows how to write.



* I qualify 'liberal' when I use it.  Liberals are dyed in the wool capitalists who moved humanity a great leap forward when they got rid of hereditary rule.  Unfortunately their ideas have not progressed much since the late 1790's when they chopped the head off aristocracy.  And now billionaires are a new aristocracy.  The negation of the negation.  Elements of the past.  As ideas did not progress, the ideas they replaced now consume those with arrested development as the imperfections of liberalism become apparent.  Desperation makes a horrible past seem romantic the imitation animal.

[RE]

Asians are leading the depopulation race by a substantial margin.

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/china/east-asias-coming-population-collapse

East Asia's Coming Population Collapse

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[RE]

"Since 2008 until today we have lost around 200,000 newborns," she said. "Two-thirds of them are due to the fact that potential parents are missing. That's because of the decline in births that dates back to 30 years ago."

In 2023 alone the government allocated around 1 billion euros for measures aimed at helping women cope with motherhood and work.

But Ardiano Bordingnon, president of the National Forum of Families, believes this is not enough, and that an EU intervention is required.

Exactly how are they supposed to "intervene"?  Pass a law that EU women have to get pregnant or pay a fine?  What?

https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2024/05/10/italys-falling-birth-rate-is-a-crisis-thats-only-getting-worse

Italy's falling birth rate is a crisis that's only getting worse

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