this post was submitted on 24 May 2025
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If you have a country that's below it's replacement rate then you need net positive immigration to compensate for this. Likewise if your above replacement rate and have problems with overpopulation then you need net negative immigration. This is fairly straightforward demographics and economics. Being too far below replacement rate without immigration leads to an aging population, and even countries like China which used to have serious overpopulation issues can fall fowl of this. Aging population is the root of a lot of economic and cultural issues. Saying immigration is bad is not just wrong, it's the exact opposite of what the situation calls for in most European nations, the USA, Japan, and South Korea.
2% of workers produce enough agricultural output to provide for 200% of society. And it's similar in other branches of the economy. We'd be able to live well with a significantly lower number of workers. The reason why people still work so much is because we're not actually working for the wellbeing of society, but mostly towards the pockets of the rich. That's what causes a shortage of workers.
There's not actually a shortage of workers if society produces for the wellbeing of society, instead of for the pockets of the rich.
On top of that, if AI replaces workers in the near future, we'd have the opposite problem of a mass unemployment crisis. Having fewer people in the country is then a good thing because there's less workers to fill the remaining workplaces.
Note that it doesn't matter whether you think that AI can replace workers. What matters here is what companies think. And we're already seeing mass layoffs due to AI.
I mean this is full of stuff that dosen't pass the sniff test.
Modern society has a lot more than just agricultural workers, and in western countries much of the food is imported anyway which I am not sure you have accounted for. If you want modern standards of living your going to need a lot more workers than that.
As for the whole thing of us working for rich people. You are exactly right that they have the most money. That doesn't mean they actually spend all that on themselves, and it certainly doesn't mean they consume the lions share of physical goods requiring work for their personal pleasure. If you look at someone like Elon for example, as evil as they are most of the money they spend will be in investments to public companies. Things like the development of SpaceX rockets, new electric cars, data centers to push AI, and so on. Very little of that is spent on their personal needs. Still way more than we could ever afford, none of us are getting rides in private jets, but since there are only so few people at that level it doesn't add up to much in the scheme of things. Even if we got rid of Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and so forth we would still have to fund R&D somehow, and all those scientists and engineers still want to be paid or taken care of. Things could potentially be made more efficient by combining the efforts of some of these companies, but that doesn't mean you ask scientists to go home, it just means innovation happens that much faster. Heck sometimes competition can be good for innovation, so you might still keep around competing teams even if they are all technically funded by the same government or public institution.
If anything we might need to work harder for a time after capitalism to repair the damage done to people and the planet. Certainly all oil and gas infrastructure needs to be replaced, and that means lots of new stuff needs to be built and research needs to be done at break neck pace. Ending economic exploitation doesn't magically fix everything that's wrong with the world, it would only be step 1.
It's also unlikely that capitalism is going away soon anyway, so this is all moot. It is after all the most efficient system we have built to date, even if it's crazy bad in some areas, and coming up with something to replace it that wouldn't just be worse is a tall order. Many have died trying.