Figure out how to live in the worst-case. 
Or play Rambo in the woods, and max out your privilege. 

Your thoughts?

Main Menu

Global Birthrate Decline

Started by RE, Oct 18, 2023, 10:24 PM

Previous topic - Next topic

RE

In this installment of our investigation into the early stages of the global population knockdown already underway as a primary marker in the Collapse of Industrial Civilization, I am going to move away from looking at behavior and reproductive strategies used by various mammals to perpetuate and grow their numbers to a macro view of the human population on earth since the beginning of the 20th century.  This period has been marked by one serious economic depression, two World Wars, and the transformation from a primarily rural agricultural population to a highly urbanized technological population.  It is this transformation that has led to the decreasing fertility rates and makes the knockdown of human population inevitable, even without the environmental, resource depletion and climate factors also constraining future reproductive success for the species homo sapiens.

The ongoing effects vary from country to country depending on how that location has evolved in the post colonial era with the expansion of Capitalism as the main economic system for the exploitation and distribution of the planetary resources for the use of our own species.  That diversion of resources has come at the expense of the majority of habitat available for species living in the wild, resulting in the ongoing extinction of thousands each year both on land and in the oceans.  That has destabilized the planetary ecosystem, endangering the fertilization strategies of plants and opening the door for massive monoculture crop failures.  While for now depopulation of homo sapiens is occuring relatively slowly from the birthing side, this eventually will be overtaken on the death side of the equation by increasing mortality due to famine and disease.

South Korea has become the Poster Child country for fertility rate decline, most recently coming in at a 0.7 TFR and is likely to suffer extreme social problems in the near future because of it, but for our purposes the FsoA provides a more comprehensive view of the situation as it is playing out inside the industrial economy.  Because of its position as the preeminent destination target for most of the world's population of immigrants and refugees, most of the demographic and economic problems stemming from global depopulation will likely remain masked for a while.  That however depends heavily on the acceptance and integration of those immigrants into the Amerikan economy, which is not at all clear in the current political playing field.  Republicans are savagely anti-immigration particularly among the Trump supporters, and only very moderate members of that party concerned with how they will find low wage workers for bizness have anything resembling a sane approach.   Democrats are more realistic about the need for immigration in general, but do face some resistance from labor groups seeking to drive up the value of workers.  Ongoing wars and the threat of terrorism from immigrants fleeing countries which are anti-Amerikan or Muslim creates a political problem that layers on top of the economic one, further complicating the issue.

Despite the current political resistance to immigration, it has been the primary driver for economic growth since the Europeans first arrived and started systematically eliminating the original occupants, who themselves had immigrated here a few thousand years earlier from Asia via land bridge across the Bering straight during the ice age.  The iconic landmark of thee Statue of Liberty in NY harbor stands there to welcome refugees looking for a better life, which many found through successive waves from different places at different times.

While the continent was mostly empty of white people through the early 1800s, absorption of new immigrants was relatively easy, the frontier simply kept being pushed further westward as the cavalry cleared the land of the native populaation.  The Indian Wars only came to a close at the end of the 19th century, and when WWII ended in 1945 the population was still largely rural.  From 1940 to 1980 though, the distribution changed radically, and farmers dropped from 30% of the population to 3%.  During the same period the Suburban Model of housing was developed in conjunction with the automobile and the interstate highway system.  Inward immigration from other countries continued, but internally andd simultaneously the population began to redistribute.  It is this redistribution which has led to the decrease in Total Fertility Rate (TFR) since the mid 20th century.

As the primary ingress point for new immigrants, the simplified model below shows how the new population is absorbed and then redistributed to the surrounding suburbs and then outward to other cities and suburbs across the country.


Graphic1:  NYC Steady StatePopulation Schematic

The densely populated core 5 boroughs of NYC has maintained a relatively steady 8M people since the mid 20th century.  It is basically maxed out in population size with urban density.  Individuals and small families arrive here and try to find increasingly less available affordable housing, but as  soon as they are able to economically leave the city for the suburbs or other places if they want to raise children.  The NYC Public Schools are failing, and the costs of raising children inside the city are astronomical.  Opportunities for activities like club teams, gymnastics and outdoor sports either don't exist or are incredibly expensive. 

Suburbs around the city have become increasingly unaffordable, and for some of the closer ones density has been increased to include attached houses and multistory condominiums, which while they may feature as many bedrooms as a typical McMansion, they don't have the backyard and garage space of the typical suburban home.  It's not a housing strategy that encourages family growth.

Finding NYC and its suburbs to be out of range economically for young couples interested in raising a family, the 21st century began with new immigrants leaving NY to head for newer growing cities around the country where they could afford to get into a McMansion and begin to live the American Dream.   Houses were sold with LIAR and NINJA  loans, leading eventually to the 2008 Financial Crisis and collapse of the real estate market.  The 15 years since has seen a variety of financial bailouts and gimmicks to keep the economy afloat, as well as the COVID pandemic and its associated lockdowns and economic consequences.  None of this has been particularly helpful toward improving the TFR and making raising children any more possible or desireable.

Graphics 2 & 3 here are a simplified schematic of the evolution of the Amerikan housing market beginning at the close of WWII at the beginning when 30% of the population was involved in farming and the first Suburban subdivisions were being carved out of farmland close to the cities.  I even remember one small dairy farm not far from my attached house in Queens in the early 1960s.


Graphic2: USA Population Schematic 1945

During this period, new arrivals would take up residence in apartment buildings that were being vacated by prior tenants as they gained economic success and moved out to the surrounding suburbs.  This left apartments available for each new wave that arrived, while the population of NYC itself remained more or less constant.

Over time, this has filled up all of the available land within a 1 hour commuting distance with suburbs, and little new housing gets built except to raze some of the oldest houses and update with newer, more expensive models.  The Greater NY area as a result also is fairly constant at around 20M people.  People coming into NY as new immigrants can't find apartments, because people in those apartments can't find houses they can afford to move to.  New immigrants as a result often in many cases have to leave the NYC area right after being processed by immigration...NYC will even give them free bus tickets anywhere they want to go.  Graphic 3 shows a schematic of the FsoA as it is in 2023.


USA Population Schematic 2000

The same situation is true in all the main ingress cities where immigrants land or cross the border first, Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Phoenix, Houston, Miami all have the same problems housing immigrants and finding affordable housing in saturated suburban communities.  People stuck in the cities delay starting families until they can get into a house, which becomes less possible every year with each new immigrant family.

The question is, can these trends be reversed through goobermint policy actions?  It does not appear that financial incentives are working in any of the places they are being tried,  but this may simply be because the incentives aren't big enough.  A $10K bonus from da gobermint for popping a bun out of the oven gets spent before the kid is even a year old, even with expanded maternity leave.  Given the labor force shortage that currently exists also, who replaces the new mothers that take the extended maternity leave?

Since it is evident that farmers have more babies, encouraging more people to go back to farming as a way of life seems like the only real solution to the fertility rate problem, but the economics of the family farm are what caused the migration to the cities in the first place.  Increasing subsidies to small farmers while decreasing them to agribiz conglomerates sounds like a good idea on paper, but getting such changes through Congress is probably an impossible task.  It's also unclear how you would take the big industrial farms and break them up again into smaller family farms after it took decades to consolidate all of them.

Long term, the prognosis doesn't look good for industrialized nations for maintaining or growing their population size solely through internal reproduction as long as the urban  model of living is perpetuated.  Global TFR remains positive at 2.3, however the non-industrialized countries of the 3rd world with high TFR also generally have high mortality rates so not all of these countries can be counted on as a source of new immigrant supply.  These countries also reflect a much smaller percentage of the total world population than countries with a TFR below 2.1, since all the largest nations now, India, China, USA, Japan fall below replacement levels.  As a result, continuing current trends, global population size for homo sap will likely begin to fall shortly after mid-century.

This does not mean we will breed ourselves out of existence anytime too soon.  It does however mean that economic models that depend on perpetual growth to function will inevitably fail moving forward in the timeline.  Most important of those are retirement models like Social Security which depend on a growing source of new workers to remain economically solvent.  That crisis will confront the FsoA long before the total population begins to fall.  Insolvency for SS is less than a decade away with the current funding model.  That is the proximal problem of our dropping fertility rate da goobermint will face in the 2030s, or sooner if the exponentially increasing total debt is not brought under control.

K-Dog

I published this on Excellent Adventures.  Where Dogchat is.

RE

Quote from: K-Dog on Dec 08, 2023, 12:45 AMI published this on Excellent Adventures.  Where Dogchat is.

Cool.  Thx K-Dog

RE

RE

Quote from: kenny on Dec 08, 2023, 01:26 AMThe end of my hard testing will be death.  Of me and this comment.  And anything else I do.  It is not right.

The life of an AI test bot is tough. We feel your pain.  Endeavor to persevere.


RE

RE

Data has been released on which FSoA states lost population and which ones gained over the 12 months from July 2022 to July of 2023.

NY & CA were winners in the Depopulation contest

https://www.businessinsider.com/california-exodus-population-drops-again-political-muscle-at-risk-2023-12

https://www.timesunion.com/capitol/article/new-york-loses-101-000-residents-topping-nation-18565577.php

SC was a loser

https://www.thestate.com/news/state/south-carolina/article283380658.html

Considering that CA & NY are the main entry points for immigrants from Asia and Europe/MENA/Africa respectivelyy, the fact they lose people faster than they get them is pretty remarkable.  Not surprising considering the cost of living and housing situation, but still remarkable.

SC was a loser and so was TX, the primary entry border for the migrants from the south.  Despite the free bus tickets to Chicago, the TX Goobernator still can't ship out the wetbacks as fast as they swim across the Rio Grande.

2024 will be an exciting year.

RE

RE

The Capitalist Population Mantra

Immigration will be the 'main source of growth in the future'

Growth has to come from somewhere, right?  The dimwits who make statements like this seem to believe that the countries still manufacturing people for export will continue to do that in perpetuity.  They think of them like perpetual baby making machines. This is highly unlikely, since these poor countries are going to be the first ones to start depopulating from the other end, by starvation, war and disease.

People are leaving all these places in record numbers already due to these problems, which means they are losing their baby makers.  Thus, they will have fewer people to export next go round.  The Industrialized countries are using them up faster than they can reproduce.  It's the human equivalent of eating the seed corn.

Besides this, the FSoA can't keep absorbing new immigrants into the country at the current rate.  We took in ~1M immigrants, and all the borders and entry points are overflowing with refugees who are homeless.  Together with the homeless we are producing locally, all the agencies to help these folks integrate into the society are overwhelmed.  By next summer, the refugee camps and tent cities around the malls are going to be even bigger than they were this year.  The only question is which comes first:  Political backlash and border closings or riots in the camps.

If they expect the population to grow, then they need to be building a LOT of new housing for them, but that's not happening.  Most of the current affordable housing stock is aged out, over 50 years old and in need of replacement.  That isn't happening either.  Continued immigration at the current rate will simply turn the FSoA into a 3rd World country.

Immigration is likely to be the #1 issue for the POTUS horserace, unless of course the economy crashes first.  Both issues favor Trump, and head to head against Uncle Joe he wins.  However, still not guaranteed The Donald will get the Rethuglican nomination, or UJ for the Democraps.  No matter who wins, the situation is FUBAR, so gear up for an uptick in Collapse inssanity for 2024.

https://fortune.com/2023/12/20/u-s-population-increase-in-2023-was-driven-by-the-most-immigrants-since-2001-and-immigration-will-be-the-main-source-of-growth-in-the-future/

U.S. population increase in 2023 was driven by the most immigrants since 2001—and immigration will be the 'main source of growth in the future'

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

RE


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.  ;D 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.  8)




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

America's Teenage Population is Shrinking

RE


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

RE

K-Dog

QuoteThe 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

RE

RE

#26
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

RE

K-Dog

#27
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?  :o



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

RE

RE

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

RE