Declining birth rates and house prices dropping are both things the media love to make out are terrible things.
And they just aren't.
this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2026
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I suppose house prices dropping are pretty terrible if you see your house only as an investment, instead of a roof over your head. I know people who would be fucked in their retirement if they house price falls, because they've gambled on their house price climbing enough to carry them through retirement.
I hope they get hurt though. Treating housing as an investment that needs to turn a profit, while people are living on the streets is fucking insane.
Just saving gold has been a realistic option for all of living memory. Nobody needs gold. One is not depriving others of the resources they need to live by raising its price.
The same can't be said for housing.
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While I understand the reason why a demographic dropout would be a catastrophe, I fucking hate how they say it's our fault, when they were the ones who fucked up everything in the first place
I'll spot you "they" as the endless white nationalist nags and natalist pundits. For some reason "population collapse" never shows up as a concern for Palestinians or Cubans or Bangledeshis or Congolese. It's only ever a rich white European problem.
But this endless "I didn't start the fire" rhetoric kinda ignores how the prior generation as a whole had about as much control over their material conditions as we do now. Just being mad at The Olds neglects how many of them delivered the education and health care and technology and agriculture that brought us to the modern moment [in a good way].
Not to be all "you hate capitalism and yet cell phone" but you gotta see the prior generation as the same group of disaffected working class as we have in the modern day.
Ffs, our parents were inundated with "Overpopulation" as the crisis du jour. They were lectured over having too many kids and having kids when they were too young and not being economically independent enough to care for anyone but themselves. We inherited that from them and internalized it. And now we meticulously practice contraception because we've been drilled to believe it's the responsible thing to do.
Only post-COVID have we really seen the Natalist Panic taking off. It's a complete 180⁰ and largely the product of Millennial insecurities.
Yeah, I meant "they" as the past gens (aka Baby Boomers), and no, we DO NOT have the same control over our material conditions as they had. Think that while house prices, rents for services and prices for a lot more things are growing up endlessly, at the same time salaries are not only totally unchanged, but they're going down. Take into account that real estate is mostly dominated by older people, and most CEOs and other high-ranking figures are older people too.
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Don't care, I'm not producing wage slaves.
yeah basically. im actually fine with my genetic line going out if the earth goes on with a vibrant biosphere as well.
It's not that they're afraid of society collapsing. They clearly don't care about that, as most of what they do ignores that.
What they're worried about is the "Great Replacement", where white people become a minority. If that wasn't what they were really afraid of, then they would consider the problem of declining birth rates to be easily solvable with immigration.
I mean, declining birth rates still cause problems. Even if you're sane and don't give a shit about shifting racial demographics.
Shits gonna be really rough for my generation when we're too old to take care of ourselves, while also outnumbering the young people.
I hear this all the time, and it seems to ignore the glaring elephant in the room. When talking about whether you can keep an economic system going, what matters is not the ratio of workers to retirees, but the ratio of workers to dependents. Yes, we have more old people for each worker, but we also have fewer children. We can simply shift resources from child care to elder care. You manufacture more adult diapers and fewer infant diapers. More nurses go into gerentology than neonatal care. You shift government funding from elementary schools to pensions. More women can stay in the workforce, because fewer of us are having children. And those that do are having fewer of them.
We know that economies can adapt to rapidly growing populations. We've survived baby booms just fine. After WW2, in the US, we suddenly had to care for far more children than our system was ever built to handle. Yet we managed to muddle through it. If we can adapt to a baby boom, we can adapt to a slowly aging population. Capitalism, for all its flaws, does have some benefits. And one of those is that it's pretty efficient at reallocating resources based on changing demand.
And honestly, there are some real upsides to declining population. We can ease our impact on the environment. The real cost of housing will decline. Scarcer workers will see their wages rise. This is the real reason the billionaires are so afraid of a declining population. They need millions of desperate people struggling just to scrape by. Do you think Amazon could run its hellish warehouses the way it does if the cost of housing was half what it currently is?
That all assumes people will not be living longer in the future.
The real cost of housing will decline.
Children generally live with their parents. We'd have to all start living with our elderly parents for it to be the same in terms of housing costs.
This is the real reason the billionaires are so afraid of a declining population. They need millions of desperate people struggling just to scrape by. Do you think Amazon could run its hellish warehouses the way it does if the cost of housing was half what it currently is?
You shouldn't assume billionaires are that intelligent. A huge amount of money has been invested into AI on the promise that it will take away people's jobs. billionaires are emotionally driven idiots. They learned from Jack Welch that if you cut jobs, line goes up. Therefore if you cut half of all the jobs, line goes up big. They're small minded people that don't think in terms of how the economy functions, they only care about their businesses.
If it were the case billionaires had some over arching plan for the economy, then Jeff Bezos would be thinking that if everyone were more prosperous, people would be buying more stuff from Amazon, wouldn't he?
They just want a bigger percentage of the pie, they don't care if the entire pie is smaller and in absolute terms a smaller percent of a bigger pie is more than a larger percent of a smaller pie. Why would they? They already have more money than they could ever spend, so they're obsessed with having more power than their competitors. Racking up a high score and gaining more power.
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If history is any indicator, the political elites will inter-marry with whatever target demographic that emerges into power.
So you'd have people in the future claiming descendant from an Eterni-President-Prime-Dictator-Minister, whose face is this abomination of Caucasion-Afro American and some other gene just because.
What? I don't follow. "Abomination"?
Basically the person would have so many phenotypes from all the inter-marriages (and inbreeding, probably), you wouldn't know where one began and one ended.
I still don't understand. Are you saying that inter-racial marriage results in an abomination? If you're attempting to use some sort of rhetorical device, it's going way above my head.
Also can't oppress some wage slaves to to generate wealth for them if they are never born, it's all about money at the end, white supremacy is a secondary concern
Spoiler alert: they'll just ban contraception, abortion and sex ed instead
Jokes on them, I’m not having any sex.
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They have to decline or stabalise at fucking point, since we cant have 10 trillion people or something on the planet. Truthfully we just need the brains to figure out how to run our economy without an unending supply of increasing labour.
Some people cannot fathom the concept of limited resources. They think you can increase human population exponentially forever and it'll just work out somehow
We could easily support our current population and quite a bit more if we actually respected and shared our resources responsibly.
Hell, we could increase exponentially forever if we wanted. The universe is practically infinite
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It's interesting because it's obvious that the reason why people are having less children is because they can't afford it and they don't think it's a good idea for the children.
However, rather than actually remedying this situation, the people who want us to have as many children as humanly possible so they have more workers are doing everything in their power to make life worse.
in a way, this is my username:
Epicurus rejected any possibility of an afterlife, while still contending that one need not fear death: "Death is nothing to us; for that which is dissolved, is without sensation, and that which lacks sensation is nothing to us."[72] From this doctrine arose the Epicurean Epitaph: Non fui, fui, non sum, non curo ("I was not; I was; I am not; I do not care."), which is inscribed on the gravestones of his followers and seen on many ancient gravestones of the Roman Empire.[73]
The world is literally on fire due to climate change, numerous wars and conflicts with global repercussions, and everything is getting more expensive, while people see that politics - which is supposed to serve society - is subservient only to its masters in the business world. Overpopulation has also become an increasingly pressing issue. The outlook is bleak. Why on earth would anyone want to bring children into this real-life dystopia and deliberately subject them to this?!
20 years ago my wife and decided it was not going to happen and back then it was like. thinks don't look like they are going well economically and with the environment and our personal finances just aren't adding up. fast forward to now and best decision ever. It was debatable 20 years ago but now you have to be crazy.
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Yup. I'm just one private citizen. The replacement ratio of my country's population is not my responsibility. 🤷♂️
Republicans will simply declare that child birth is the patriotic duty of every American woman of healthy reproductive capacity. Men will be drafted to war. Women will be drafted into childbirth via forced artificial insemination. Legally speaking, if a man can be drafted to give up his life and sacrifice his body "for the greater good of the nation," there's little reason that a woman couldn't be drafted for forced birth. If your government can force you to die for your country, your government can force you to give birth for your country.
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We are in a shitty pay to win permadeath coop mmorpg where the game balance has been totally broken by indivualistic whales. Of course no new players want to subscribe to this shit.
There's been a rash of people like Elon Musk posting rants about "declining birth rates in the developing world" (and sometimes dog whistling while at it) - getting upset that contrary to the worries of Malthus and Ehrlich, it turns out humans are not the same as bacteria in a petri dish just exponentially reproducing until they exhaust all the carrying capacity of their environment. Instead, it seems that those of us that are in paradigms where we have relatively high per capita energy and materials consumption, respond to economic, cultural and environmental stimuli, and slow our roll once we feel we are at an "x" threshold of population density and environmental & economic stress.
Given that we live on a finite planet with finite resources this small bit of self control might just be what saves humanity from a truly dystopian future.
What the demographic shift of less younger workers versus more retiring seniors does mean is that our systems of depending on constant growth of consumption for our faith in our currency and financial institutions, and for providing for government guaranteed retirement funding, both end up under threat - but those issues could still be easily fixed simply by allowing more immigration from the multitude of places on this globe that still have relatively high birth rates, that have plenty of people with strong work ethics seeking greater opportunities.
Given that we live on a finite planet with finite resources this small bit of self control might just be what saves humanity from a truly dystopian future.
I don't think it's a planetary limit we're hitting. Population expansion is highest in parts of the world with some of the worst living conditions.
A lot boils down to access to contraception. Take that away and all those horny teenagers will fuck out more babies, because hormones override any kind of logical long term economic understanding.
declining birth rates in the developing world
Looks like it ain't developing anymore lol
I really like how you connected the birth rates and excessive consumerism as a self-fulfilling prophecy. As capitalism reaches its apex, motivations for increasing birth rate collapse. As birth rates collapse, excessive consumerism stagnates, because people can't afford to retire.
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We've got 8 billion people alive on this planet. We're doing just fine...
The rich already decided they don't want to prevent this, they'd rather just replace everyone underneath them. That's why the AI bubble just won't pop even though its a blackhole for money
oh no declining birth rates, how horrible for the ones who decided not to have kids, and hence don't have anyone to worry about
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