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this post was submitted on 15 Sep 2023
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Little Jimmy won't give a fuck how he was born unless we give him shit about it. And believe it or not, people who have enough money to afford artificial wombs do not contribute to overpopulation.
Elon Musk has 11 children, but aside from that, that’s an ominous thing to read. What are the downsides of overpopulation? Overconsumption of resources/overburdening the environment, both of which people who are rich enough to afford artificial wombs do more than the rest of us. Even more unfortunate, wealth is a largely heritable trait
Elon Musk would be able to pay as many women as he'd like to have his spawn, so artificial wombs to people at his level are irrelevant.
Lots of women could be cool with an artificial womb, but not surrogacy , so I could see it being the difference for one of his kids or for the many, many people with obscene wealth and high consumption.
Either way, whether you birth or grow a child, you are contributing to the population.
Your money doesn't matter, +1 human is +1 human. As if we don't have enough already...
At the end of the day there still needs to be a population, and a sudden demographic collapse is much more devastating than overpopulation. We have a lot of systems that are dependent on being manned by a lot of people, and putting the kibosh on all births would leave a lot of vacant spots we can't fill right now.
Pump the brakes on Malthusian scaremongering just a little bit, okay?
We have so many automated systems these days that there's less demand for human labor. If there isn't a robot to do it, there's a spreadsheet calculator to do it.
It's getting harder to find work these days, now that companies are automating workers out of a job. Go ahead, see how many cashier openings there are at your nearest Walmart.
Self checkout anybody?
Unless you are actively for killing people once they hit a certain age, demographic collapse is a real problem. You cannot care for the elderly with nothing but robots. Elders need healthcare. They need people in general and unlike young people they don't move from dead rotting towns. In demographic collapse they don't even have anyone to make them because they don't have kids.
See Japan for how demographic collapse is working out. Young people are being crushed by the weight of what it takes to care for too many old people. And the cycle is only getting worse because of course young people don't have kids when very stressed. Japan has whole towns going to rot. They're economy is experiencing negative effects from not having the expected amount of workers for what they need.
You really want a gradually declining population. You want your birth rate to be about 2. 2.1 is the replacement rate. Currently the US is the only developed country doing this and mostly by accident due to immigration. The US is experiencing a much less pronounced pension crisis than other developed nations. Instead we can focus exclusively on our fascist regime bid for power. That's our of population decline as well, but we get to fight against it since the US is fairly balanced in demographics (for now. It remains to be seen how the millennial generation will handle being dominant generation in a decade or so)
The wealthy require a functioning economy to continue to be wealthy. A functioning economy requires that there be enough money being spent. People can't spend money if they don't have jobs. The wealthy will ensure people will have jobs. They might not be great jobs and people might be treated like shit, but there will be jobs. There might be periods where there is vast unemployment, but those periods never last long.
Go ahead, see how many cooper(barrel maker) or elevator operator openings there are. Before the invention of the ICE there used to be an incredible number of people involved in farming because it is super labor intensive from start to finish. It used to be one of the primary employment source for a majority of the country, the world even. Now one farmer can till, plant, and harvest hundreds to thousands of acres all by their self. all thanks to technology. Once it took tens of people to till fields, then some stone age genius invented the plow. So it took a handful of people to pull and direct the plow. Then someone realized they could hook animals up instead of using other people. Jobs are constantly disappearing and being replaced with new types of jobs. Your point is moot, as history has proved time and again.
You seem to be putting an awful lot of faith in wealthy people understanding that and also acting in their own long term self interest. History suggests that instead they'll prioritize short term profit over long term stability. I suspect a much more likely outcome is that the rich barricade themselves along with large caches of supplies while huge chunks of the population are left to starve to death and die of disease. If you want to know what that's going to look like just look at North Korea.