The Economic Implications of a Baby Bust

2 months ago by uszo165 to c/degrowth

At some point, degrowth becomes inevitable.
SnarkoPolo 32 points 2 months ago

Try having a society that actually supports families with things like a living wage, time off, health care.

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balsoft 8 points 2 months ago

While all three are good policies to have, they aren't enough to make people want to have babies as demonstrated by birth rates in most countries that have them. It turns out that raising a human properly is a lot of work and a lot of responsibility, not to say that it requires women to go through pregnancy and childbirth, both exhausting and potentially traumatic events. If we are to raise birth rates, we need to offer way more than just this bare minimum.

Changing our societal structure to encourage communal child raising so that responsibility doesn't fall fully on young inexperienced parents would be one potential step. Developing tools to help women go through pregnancy and childbirth more easily would be another.

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reallykindasorta 2 points 2 months ago

And also generally improving society’s outlook. I’d like to have kids in a world headed in an optimistic direction where I can imagine them living well.

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sudoMakeUser 4 points 2 months ago

All three are offered in every developed nation, where do you live?

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altphoto 13 points 2 months ago

Donaldland

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TheGoldenV 5 points 2 months ago

In a crappy place…

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GiantChickDicks 4 points 2 months ago

The Bad Place.

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MrMakabar 7 points 2 months ago

The key part about this is that this is going to shrink the supply of labour faster then the demand. All the old factories and so forth will still be around. So this strengthens the position of workers against the capital. We also will keep a lot of the old infrastructure. In Western Europe, where we have long term financial data going back centuries, there have been two periods of the wealth gap closing. One was after the Black Death and the other after WW2. In both cases there was a lot of death shrinking the labour force.

The other key part is that this is already happening. There was a peak in births in 1990 with 143.5million globally. After that it fell for a bit to then hit another peak in 2012 with 146.1million. Current UN projects are that that will be the peak in the foreseeable future.

This is why the leadership class is talking about birth rates so much. They are worried about their power.

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HerbGrower 2 points 2 months ago

So could this actually benefit the workers? Although which ones. Wouldn't be surprised if they manage to fuck over 1 more generation first...

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MrMakabar 1 point 2 months ago

The ones organizing the best. You can see that with unions, politics and a lot of other things. Falling number of people of working age can be dealt with somewhat by forcing people to work. Any way to fight it or even reduce working time per person, by a shorter work week, earlier retirement or even work day helps. Obviously it also depends on industry and global competition. However it currently looks like the system of globalization is splitting up a bit.

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HerbGrower 1 point 2 months ago

A few people at work keep complaining about pay but always do it in comparisons. Like "my role was advertised for 3k more than I am on" when talking about an advert that closed ages ago and I didn't see.

I'll tell anyone exactly how much I am on with the most bare minimum of prompting or mention of pay.

The people complaining most are in roles that from what I can tell require a lot more than mine and I get the impression the pay increase isn't as much as it should be. For my role specifically I feel fine. For theirs I would want like +10k minimum and I wonder if its more like +2k.

Or take it to get the role in my job history and start looking for a similar role somewhere else fairly quickly. Hey, I think I know why the last guy left so soon...

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DMCMNFIBFFF 1 point 2 months ago

FWIW,

wp:Voluntary Human Extinction Movement

The Voluntary Human Extinction Movement (VHEMT[A]) is an environmental movement that calls for all people to abstain from reproduction in order to cause the gradual voluntary extinction of humankind. VHEMT supports human extinction primarily because it would prevent environmental degradation. The group states that a decrease in the human population would prevent a significant amount of human-caused suffering. The extinctions of non-human species and the scarcity of resources caused by humans are frequently cited by the group as evidence of the harm caused by human overpopulation.

...

VHEMT rejects government-mandated human population control programs in favor of voluntary population reduction,[2] supporting only the use of birth control and willpower to prevent pregnancies.[3] Knight states that coercive tactics are unlikely to permanently lower the human population, citing the fact that humanity has survived catastrophic wars, famines, and viruses.[10]

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LibertyLizard 1 point 2 months ago

No thanks.

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gandalf_der_13te 0 points 2 months ago

According to a recent study, the mean sperm count of the global male population declined by 51.6% between 1973 and 2018.

You only need a single sperm to cause fertilization. That's not the reason for a sinking birth rate.

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