"A reduction in the share of workers can lead to labor shortages, which may raise the bargaining power of employees and lift wages — all of which is ultimately inflationary,” Simona Paravani-Mellinghoff, managing director at BlackRock, wrote in an analysis last year.
And while net immigration has helped offset demographic problems facing rich countries in the past, the shrinking population is now a global phenomenon. “This is critical because it implies advanced economies may start to struggle to ‘import’ labour from such places either via migration or sourcing goods,” wrote Paravani-Mellinghoff.
This is just mask-off capitalism. They want people to have a lot of babies, and/or large numbers of poor and desperate people migrating into the country, so that they have a constant, reliable source of cheap labor.
Paying workers more is inflationary, but raising the cost of goods because you control the supply chain is “business”
Basically, raising product costs to cover increased labour costs are bad because actual workers are getting that money instead of the wealthy capital class.
I wish people understood boycotting more. Sure 6 companies own everything, but remember when the cost of a barrel of oil went significantly negative because people weren’t driving for 2 weeks?
If people collectively decided they didn’t want to buy anything but the absolute necessary staples for a few months there would be an absolute catastrophe in the supply chain and they’d be forced to lower prices significantly.
They may not lower prices forever, but modern business is built entirely on supply chain logistics. If people stop buying anything, or buy things exclusively to return them we would see some serious changes
I’ve tried to convince people that if we can have a No Nut November, we ought to be able to put together a No-Sales September or something. These mentally defective executives would absolutely go back to taking care of the customer if this were a practice.
We should definitely do November for it - holiday shopping and Black Friday specifically.
Hell, if we could just boycott Black Friday and the week before and after, which is the biggest retail spend of the year, we’d probably make a serious dent. They aren’t even good deals, but good luck convincing anyone to skip it who doesn’t already.
I knew even before I opened the article it’s gonna be about fewer babies = fewer workers. Remember folks, when an article cites the “economy”, it just means the businesses and industries’ profits.
I’d like to put Simona’s mind at ease because economics research into the relationship between wages and productivity shows a casual link where higher wages increase productivity. That is, higher wages force firms to invest in technology, equipment and training in order to offset the increased labor cost.
Remember kids, “the economy” is double-speak for “record breaking profits for the rich”.
Personally, I always substitute it with “rich people’s yacht money”
Infinite growth is an absolutely insane bar to set for the economy.
The lowered birthrates are because we’re getting ground into dust - my engineering team of twenty millennials has two folks with kids and two folks who openly plan on having kids… we’re aging out of the window and it’s not that we’re trying and failing - most of us just don’t want a fucking family. We’re too fucking busy already.
Mental health never being addressed, so we’re also too tired.
“Burned outs just another word for not taking your bosses shit” - sing it to the tune of Me and Bobby McGee.
I got an hour long seminar at 12, wagie!
We will fix u
Viruses, Pyramid Schemes and Capitalism, oh my!
Half my life was spent fearing the result of limitless population growth and contemplating the inevitability of war and famine to shock population levels back down to sustainable levels. They warned us about this starting at least as far back as the sixties.
I see organic population collapse as a categorically good thing.
Long-term, possibly. But if the collapse happens too quickly it may cause a lot of issues. A slow steady decline would be best but may be difficult to achieve.
The oligarchy is welcome to not poison people.
That’s why I tell hard-right folks that childless homosexuality is the cornerstone of God’s plan to save humanity
There are more people in the world than ever before and we have folks writing news stories telling us there’s a crisis building and that we need to have more kids?
They’re farming us like ranch animals.
Infinite growth requires infinite bodies to feed it.
Unfortunately I don’t have infinite fucks to give
I think our planet would be described as a free-range human labour farm, to anyone who was able to view it independently. Well, lots of it not so free-range. Its why they’re coming for reproductive freedom. They’re doing for the same reason a beef farmer wouldn’t give their cows reproductive freedom.
Look at long term trends, population is already dropping in East Asia and Europe
Sure, there might be more people in Nigeria, but they are not paying into your retirement
Yeah maybe this way of handling retirement doesn’t work? It’s clearly a pyramid scheme.
Obviously, but how do you fix it without getting more workers? No scheme would work without people doing work.
Society needs farmers and doctors. Like it or not, everything else is optional.
Where are you going to get new doctors if everyone in your society is 70 years old
Nurses are now optional? EMTs? Firefighters? Military personnel? Police?
I’m talking about necessary for the species to carry on existing. And yes I grew up in a place with no police, no military, no EMTs, no firefighters. We had a nurse though. If someone did something that would normally involve the police, it was settled by the parties involved. (If you got drunk and drove through someone’s fence, they’d show you up at your house with a roll of barbed wire and some fence posts and you’d have to fix it. Possibly also round up any escaped sheep)
Enjoy being conquered by another country if you don’t have a military. Sure, the species will survive, but you may not
Always were
HEY WORLD LEADERS: make the world a less shitty place, so I don’t feel guilty about bringing a child into it, and I’ll rawdog more often. Do we have a deal?
Sorry, the best I can do…
The problem with capitalism, is eventually you run out of other people’s labor
Capitalism is just a complex pyramid scheme. Change my mind.
No, you’re correct.
You run out of other people’s money. You can squeeze labor to starvation working in a salt mine. However, if most all people lose all their money, capitalism is done, and currently runaway capitalism is doing everything it can to increase that disparity.
This person was referencing the obtuse and infuriatingly repeated quote from Margaret Thatcher (rot in piss) “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money”.
I don’t think I need to point out exactly why this quote is stupid.
I had no idea she said that. No, I’m not a Thatcher fan.
Then falling birthrate shouldn’t be an issue?
In a world with too many humans already, can you imagine painting a drop in the birth rate as somehow a bad thing?
lol
I don’t really care about its impact on the economy, but I do feel for those who are attempting to have a child to no avail. I can only imagine how soul crushing that process can be.
“Fertility crisis” in the headline doesn’t refer to anyone’s inability to have children. It refers to the fertility rate, which is just statistics about how many kids are popping out.
Thanks for remembering us Not Rick.
Where do you live where the economy doesn’t affect you?
I don’t, those people are selfish. Creating an unwilling life destined to be yet another cog in the machine while the world burns just to satisfy one’s own animalistic desire to have some form of genetic spawn. I silently cheer every time “struggling” couples miscarry and are unwittingly forced to do the right thing and not have kids.
Lmao what is this edge-lord shit?
MFW my parents didn’t even attempt to invent a time machine to ask if it was cool to conceive me or not
Those people do not share your perspective. I do view it as largely subconsciously selfish, but your take is fucked up.
My take is fucked up only because we continue to ascribe reproduction as some noble, precious thing; rather than a wildly irresponsible and selfish act.
Imagine a couple is driving a truckload of garbage to dump in the ocean. They have no reason to do this except some primal instinct that tells them to, all so they can point at the pile of floating garbage afterwards and say “look, that is MY garbage”.
Now imagine on the way to the ocean, the truck loses a tire and they crash off the road next to a garbage dump, and all the garbage in their truck goes flying over the fence and into the dump.
Then these people want and expect sympathy from others because they lost their garbage. They were really looking forward to standing on the beach and watching their garbage float free into the ocean and cause more of a mess. Oh no, boo hoo, fate accidentally caused them to do the right thing.
Lol. There is nothing in existence which has a choice of its being thrown into existence. Is all existence immoral?
The problem is the average age increases, and you’ll have more of an elderly population, meaning barely any people actually working while a ton of people are on pensions
That’s why I’m living now, not waiting for retirement. I got a good 15 years left, maybe 20 if I push it. Then I’m tapping out. Not a fan of keeping on living just for the sake of breathing.
Then invest in medical research on keeping me young for longer, instead of keeping me old for longer
The solution is obviously to take away womens’ reproductive rights. Duh.
Looks like not having kids in protest of how shitty things are is working. Everyone keep it up.
We are all Lysistrata now
The best way you can help fight climate change is to not have children.
This statement always reminds me of the movie Idiocracy.
Fortunately, intelligence appears to have a wide range of genetic factors. Stupid parents can have quite intelligent children.
The documentary, at this point.
Less people means less stress on the environment though.
And more houses, and more job opportunities.
We’ll be…the new people will be fine!
Except the population (at least in my country) is quickly growing anyway because so many refugees come. And there will be far more if climate change continues at this speed.
Edit: this comment isn’t directed against immigration (judging by the downvotes you probably interpreted it that way), I’m just stating the way it is rn
3 people in a 737 don’t make 100people non matter what side they seat at or how many times they change seats…but if they seat at the right place near an emergency exit with no seatbelt on, they could make it 2 people or even 1 person in the plane!
In the long term perhaps. But it will probably take too long.
The world needs more babies.
Does it?
Or do we just need to embrace migrants?
“A reduction in the share of workers can lead to labor shortages, which may raise the bargaining power of employees and lift wages — all of which is ultimately inflationary,” Simona Paravani-Mellinghoff, managing director at BlackRock, wrote in an analysis last year.
“Have babies,” said the billionaire, “or else who am I going to exploit in the future?”
Or, better yet, do we need to embrace the idea that infinite growth isn’t possible, and adopt economic systems that do not rely on it?
We need the opposite of more babies
Sounds awesome. Bring it on. Less people is better fuck the infinite growth economy
The problems listed in the article are real. we’ve built a system:
- Where a lot of economic growth stems from an increasing supply of (cheap) labour
- That relies on people of working age being able to financially support a retiree class.
Both of these are going to fall apart if the population stops growing. The smaller group of working age people won’t be enough to support the amount of retirees, and without population growth there’s no economic growth.
It’s sad that economists correctly see all this coming but then conclude that the only solution is “make more babies.” It’s short term thinking almost by definition, because in the limit it’s rather obvious that at some point we will not have the resources to support any more people. And the closer we get to that limit the less each individual person will have (even worse when wealth is not equally distributed).
Unfortunately I don’t see any economist putting forth a plan that accepts population decline and alters the system to account for it. It wouldn’t be easy but it seems no one is even trying.
How is it not easy? 90% of all jobs are automated or are going to be automated away in the next few years. I only see one social class that holds us back from de facto post-scarcity. We just need to get rid of it.
I commend your optimism, but personally I’m not sure automation is actually going to carry us through this in the time frames that we need. This population problem is going to hit really hard in the next twenty to thirty years. I don’t think we’re going to fully automate the world economy in that time.
2 thoughts:
- the level of automation we have right now is enough to produce most of the stuff we need with very little assistance, as most of the useful stuff has been automated 30-40 years ago; while i agree that we are missing some important things, i think the real problem is the cleptocracy at the top
- the stuff that is being automated now is really a problem more than a solution, and is going to stop progress by putting out of work software developers and other creative professions. I’m not saying it’s going to replace them all, but if it replaces enough job positions, it’s going to make the profession a risky choice for new students and that’s going to slow down the engine a lot
Not even close. Despite the hype being pushed by tech companies the latest wave of AI has extremely niche use cases and it’s already beginning to plateau.
That means the supply of workers in many countries is quickly diminishing.
I thought AI was going to take our jobs.
Right? They must not think AI and automation can replace very many human laborers, otherwise they wouldn’t consider declining birth rates to be such a crisis.
Of course it is! We are simultaneously facing a labor shortage and mass unemployment. The important thing is to keep being angry and frightened, the specific subject you’re angry about at any given time is flexible.
You can have both a labor shortage and mass unemployment. It occurs when workers are skilled for an industry with decreasing or no demand while another industry that requires different skills has increasing demand.
A good example of this is the high demand in the US for so called “Blue Collar” jobs. We have a shortage of trades people (Electricians, Plumbers, HVAC, etc) and far too many Business and Marketing people. There’s 100,000 MBA’s out there looking for a job and there’s 100,000 Plumbing Contractors trying to hire someone.
