More proof of human insanity

Politics and Social Issues
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Besides everything else, I’m seeing more news and commentary about the drop in birth rates. Ten years ago it was conspiracy theorists saying Gates was trying to kill people because he gave a speech about improving the lives of people in Africa and how that would help to slow and even reverse population growth. Lately I’m seeing more people lamenting how “no one wants to have babies anymore.”

The problems of too many people seem to have fallen of the radar. It’s a symptom of extremist journalism is the type that gets attention. The idea that moderating our desire procreate might be a good idea is too tame.

The people who had the right idea are swinging on the other direction

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Society needs youth to sustain itself, so insane is the wrong word.

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We have billions of youth

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Not hard for parents to send their only child to war when America starts bombing china

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It is a matter of balance, too many children and the world explodes, not enough and it dies.

for instance, Japan demography is a disaster. with harsh consequences.

A Japanese view

Japan demography consequences

Germany faces the same difficulties.

In fact, it is a question of mathematics and sustainability.

Between aged and young people, if a worker must work to support himself and 2 other people, earning just enough to support himself, it is not sustainable socially, economically and politically.

Now, if you want women to have children, some basic conditions must be fulfilled,

  • the first one is the freedom to have children or not, some of the more restrictive countries on women control on their fertility have the lowest birth rate
  • the second one is economical support, to bear and raise a child costs,
  • the third one is that to bear a child and raise him not be a drag on the women professional career, it means that a woman who bears a child is not penalized professionally, and get the institutional support she needs, for instance, nurseries for the young children
  • the fourth condition is that the men accept to share the work …
  • and the fifth condition is hope for themselves and their children. In France, the baby boom began in 1943, when many young men were war prisoners in Germany.

If you think at the level of global world population, immigration is not a solution.

6

They are talking about economic growth as if it is the best way to measure the health of a country. It’s not.

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it is not only a question of economic growth. Nowadays, in Japan there 70 supported people by 100 workers. In 2070, there will be 100 supported people for 100 workers.

8

Worldwide, yes. The problem is many societies like China have a huge aging population without enough youth to pick up the slack.

9

This is the insanity, that the problem of spending massive amounts of money on ourselves at the end of our lives is not mentioned when discussing this “aging population.” Why anyone thinks it’s their problem what I choose to do with my life didn’t make sense when I was a teenager and makes much less sense now. Discussing end of life options is still taboo, as we saw with the cries of how Obamacare was going to kill grandma. If you think about how we talk about starving children, the discussion gets even more insane.

We didn’t solve the Malthusian problem of population growth outstripping resources, we just delayed it a generation or so. We could have spent that time talking about it instead of creating more flavors of Doritos and fighting wars as if using resources somehow creates more resources.

Have you forgotten that you said this?

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Capitalism cant operate with declining populations

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It’s not doing so well with exponential growth either

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What exponential growth

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Cutslikeaknife, please not your obsessions, here.

Even though capitalism generates a great deal of resource waste, the problem would arise in the same way for any society, including a socialist one.

And, even without growth, at the current population level, the ecological dead end would persist.

Lausten is asking a philosophical question, and i would like we stay on topic.

Lausten words put me very ill at ease.

He promotes the right to choose one death, and I agree about that.

I don’t know if i am the oldest here, but i am 73, my mother is 96, and Alzheimer, it is a true question.

But, when Lausten combines:

aging,
social cost,
resource scarcity,
the political influence of the elderly,

it can give the impression that some lives are collectively becoming “too costly.”

And here a morally sensitive area emerges: we potentially move from an individual right to die, to a utilitarian logic where society might consider certain deaths desirable.

The text doesn’t explicitly state this, but it flirts with this boundary.

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Show me how a planned economy generates a great deal of resource waste

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it is not a question of waste, the matter is that we are more than 8 billions of people, that the UN projects that the world population, 8 billion as of 2023 , would peak around the year 2084 at about 10.3 billion.

Even with no waste, just keeping the same average level of consumption, we would kill the planet.

And, why do you evade the topic here, which is life and death in the present world?

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Show me how "THE PROBLEM " would arise in a planned economy

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What planned economy? What is the question? It sounds like you’re asking, “if everything was perfectly planned out, how could anything go wrong?”

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I believe i asked you what exponential growth

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That is a distinction that’s hard to avoid. Death is a right and the desire to have some die will be perceived, accurately or not. How it’s handled is important.

I forgot about this thread. I’m not the only one thinking about it:

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Logan’s run …

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