Oh no. Not the economy.
What is normal?
Is this fair?
Is this sane?
Fortunately population numbers are returning to sane levels, and doing so without bloodshed, famine or diseases. What a fortune.
The labor market is a market. It is regulated by supply and demand. The good being traded for money is human labor.
If supply goes down (fewer workers being born), prices go up; that means, higher wages.
If supply goes up (more workers being born), prices go down; that means, lower wages.
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”
That means the supply of workers in many countries is quickly diminishing.
I thought AI was going to take our jobs.
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.
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.
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.
Viruses, Pyramid Schemes and Capitalism, oh my!
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
Does anybody think about the fact that every year on average 9-10 million people die every year from starvation and malnutrition related deaths. The vast majority of these numbers are children under 5 years old. The 9-10 million number was pre-covid. There was an uptick due to the supply chain issues. I think I read an article saying the number for 2021 was around 14 million. Again, mostly children.
It’s mostly kids in 3rd world Africa, middle east, India, etc.
We over here need to have more kids though. Because profits.
Idk I just think all this is dumb. Fuck capitalism and the system we have. It’s all fucked.
In a world with too many humans already, can you imagine painting a drop in the birth rate as somehow a bad thing?
lol
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
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.
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.
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?
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
Where do you live where the economy doesn’t affect you?
“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.
Less people means less stress on the environment though.
In the long term perhaps. But it will probably take too long.
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!
"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.
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.
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.
You know what slows down inflation? An upper limit on the cost of goods. But hey im just a filthy commie.
It didn’t, not in the US, not in Soviet Union
In the Soviet Union it caused rationing instead. Here’s your coupon for 1 stick of butter
Sure buddy those are the only two countries that have existed in the world. So can’t work anywhere.
It doesn’t work because it’s a stupid idea.
If there’s a cap on the price of a type of good, then obviously only the lowest quality things get made. If you cap shoes to $10, they will only sell shoes imported from sweatshops.
If you specify exactly how something is made, like $20 for made in USA shoes, they will import it from a sweatshop and sew a logo on it in the US.
If you specify how much labor must be done in the US, there’s a chance nobody would bother since selling the $10 sweatshop shoe has better profit margins
Yeah thats not how the prices are set tho so your entire premise and basis is stupid. Have a good day. Do some reading.
What country would you point to as a success for this policy?
Can i have your list of valid countries to choose from so that my answer doesn’t get disqualified for picking a third world country.
a maximum retail price exists for most if not all goods in India. And it helps slow down inflation.
India would be perfectly valid if it wasn’t experiencing high inflation just like everyone else. Which it is.
https://finimize.com/content/rbi-chief-urges-india-to-cut-inflation-despite-strong-growth
You can’t fix inflation just by setting a max price. It leads to shortages or (more common in India’s case) retailers finding loopholes:
Didn’t say it solves inflation. You cant stop a global phenomenon happening. You can ease it.
Many Boomers voted their progeny away when they put Reagan in office.
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?”
We need the opposite of more babies
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?
Turns out that whole idea of women being the primary bearers of hundred of years of exploited reproductive labor might have had some weight to it, huh.
All that labor being redirected into “L’economie” means that, at base, you’ll have less children.
I really have no idea what these sentences mean. I feel like I’m having a stroke. Is it just me?
Women have been responsible for most of the domestic labor throughout history. Over the last 100 years or so, economies have changed so that women were first able to work outside of the home, then expected to work outside the home, and now need to work outside of the home. (E.g., a single-income household can’t pay the minimum bills in most places in the US.)
But doing labor outside the home means that labor can’t be done inside the home, because time is a finite resource; if you’re working 40 hours a week (plus commuting time), that’s 40 hours you don’t have for raising a family. That makes raising a family significantly more difficult.
The solution is to change the structure of the economy so that it’s entirely reasonably possible to raise a family on a single income without living in grinding poverty.
Yeah but how’s that supposed to maximise wealth extraction by our economic overlords?
Well first, they claim ownership over all women, then rent them out to men.
I want to say that’s just cynical sarcasm, but I’m not certain.
[Handmaid’s Tale intensifies]
Well, TBF it’s hard to maximize profit when you’re head is in a basket in front of the guillotine, sooooooooo I guess they need to figure shit out before then?
Billionaires are like an appendix. They don’t really do anything but as long as everything works normally no-one cares, but right now they’re causing a lot of pain and have to be removed. Society will function as normal just like your gut post appendectomy.
