Ask Lemmy
A Fediverse community for open-ended, thought provoking questions
Please don't post about US Politics. If you need to do this, try !politicaldiscussion@lemmy.world
Rules: (interactive)
1) Be nice and; have fun
Doxxing, trolling, sealioning, racism, and toxicity are not welcomed in AskLemmy. Remember what your mother said: if you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all. In addition, the site-wide Lemmy.world terms of service also apply here. Please familiarize yourself with them
2) All posts must end with a '?'
This is sort of like Jeopardy. Please phrase all post titles in the form of a proper question ending with ?
3) No spam
Please do not flood the community with nonsense. Actual suspected spammers will be banned on site. No astroturfing.
4) NSFW is okay, within reason
Just remember to tag posts with either a content warning or a [NSFW] tag. Overtly sexual posts are not allowed, please direct them to either !asklemmyafterdark@lemmy.world or !asklemmynsfw@lemmynsfw.com.
NSFW comments should be restricted to posts tagged [NSFW].
5) This is not a support community.
It is not a place for 'how do I?', type questions.
If you have any questions regarding the site itself or would like to report a community, please direct them to Lemmy.world Support or email info@lemmy.world. For other questions check our partnered communities list, or use the search function.
Reminder: The terms of service apply here too.
Partnered Communities:
Logo design credit goes to: tubbadu
view the rest of the comments
Almost all our social systems are built on the young providing for the old under the assumtion of generations growing. The population collapse we're currently starting will be the biggest issue in the future. (alongside the loneliness epidemic, but that's a different issue entirel)
We're in for a like a 45% reduction in generation size each generation. And this trend is only increasing rapidly. All the causes of this are deeply entrenched economically and socially, so we won't be able to turn them around on a dime.
Unless we find some social, economic or technological solutions, we are all majorly screwed. Eveyone who won't die within the next 30 years or so will be majorly affected by it.
And no, immigration can't fix it long term, because all the rest of the world is experiencing the same thing. They are just at different stages. India, China, the Americas, Europe are below replacement rate and dropping. All the other regions are are slightly above replacement rates and dropping, except Sub-Saharan Africa. Sub-Saharan African women are having one less child every 10 years, so they will be below replacement rates within a generation. More and more people having internet access will only rapidly increase these trends.
So in 20-30 years, it'll be a zero sum game who can most effectively steal each other's populations.
The only groups that are still growing normally are highly conservative religious groups. Israel is one of the only developed countries that still have normal fertility rates, and they are slowly being taken over by the ultra orthodox.
Maybe life extension or AI can save us, while generally keeping the social order in tact. But all the other solutions don't look very appealing. You could have A Handmaiden's Tale, or government/corpo created babies with artificial wombs, like Bladerunner or Brave New World...
You can't run a society on old people and for those saying it's good because climate change, you won't be able to fix climate change if everyone is in total chaos and only concerend with immediate survival. It'll be like "everything is fucked and YOU want US to stop burning coal, yeah nah".
Well maybe it won't be that bad, but it'll certainly be a huge social issue.
I'm going to be plenty sarcastic and start by flipping the "eat less avocado toast" argument.
Most of the problems are with the boomers, and if they actually wanted a better future then they should have cared more about it. Almost all of the American problems are from boomers being too selfish.
What's that one quote? "A good society is one where people plant trees that they will never know their shade?"
Boomers took the ability to live on minimum wage, after they benefited from it. Boomers took the ability to get promoted after healthcare kept them alive. Boomers are hoarding more wealth than ever and everyone is worse from it.
If the lower classes had the ability to spend any meaningful amount of money then we could easily support people after retirement. But now we have some of the most stagnant economies, and it will only get worse before it gets better.
The earth could easily support more if people actually cared by doing things like stopping coal power plants. But now instead of creating solutions we have people like you who want to force pregnancy on people for your own selfish WANTS.
I mean, it's not just boomers, because it's a world wide problem. But in general inequality is more or less the biggest problem. After every financial crisis birth rates drop and stay down.
All graphs realted to inequality and general quality of life have been steadily dropping since 1971 when we introduced the FIAT money system. Basically ever since then the entire system is set up to steal from anyone who can't benefit from debt and give that money to those who can. Any savings and income is constantly eroded away steadily making the bottom ~80% poorer. Then we also started artifically lowering interest rates, which made the stock market and real estate markets go nuts, making everyone who already had assets rich and those who didn't even poorer.
Boomers didn't really cause this, they have no idea what any of that even means, they just passively benefited from it, because they already had assets. It's more or less created by a tiny policial and financial elite conspiring to takw over our monetary system in 1971. The entire financial and monetary system were reengineered to benefit the rich.
Mark Blyth frames it as a revolt of capital in his book Angrynomics. Basically before that workers benefited hugely from the system, because wages were constantly rising in line with productivity growth and cumulative inflation was so low that you would actually save. There were no crazy real estate bubbles created by the central bank like we see today. That stopped after 1971.
I wouldn't say Boomers did this, because they were way too uneducated to even notice what happened, because they got all their news from the same people that stole their children's future. You can blame them for being to stupid to stop it, yes.
There's some other factors too, like people moving to cities and social issues, but inequality is one of the biggest, if not the biggest. It's pretty much clear as day in the data if anyone cares to even look. It's not some big mystery, it's just going completely ignored, because it would be a huge problem for the people in power.
Oh yeah, and the reason why this problem is world wide is because we exported that same system all over the world to pretty mich every country on earth. Ghadaffi wanted to break that system with an African stable gold backed currency and that's why Libya was destroyed. It would completely invalidate our imaginary money like the Dollar or the Euro and the powerful couldn't steal from the rest of us every single day.
I appreciate you responding, even if most of what I was doing was screaming into the void.
FIAT and gold standards will have similar issues, and where they differ FIAT is better. Unless you want degrowth, then gold standard is better. Our current economy is built on growth. Without growth you die.
I do feel it being correlation and not causation with line go down and FIAT. I can more easily point to legislation than I can gold.
The system was set up to steal before too. It's just now a more shuffle assets around and magic presto you now have more money.
Lol, fair enough.
You kind of lost me there. I strongly doubt there are people who planned 4d chess and have it to roll out like this. Look at Elon, who has been failing upward his whole life. Look at Bill Gates being a big baby with copy righn. In most cases it seems to be people arguing for immediate short term benefits to themselves while disregarding the future.
If you're talking about raw size, sure. People use to also be much quicker to violence. You used to have striking union workers getting gunned down by the state for a 40hr work week. We are much more tolerant to being abused.
Moving to cities have generally been what made most human technological progress. Cities are much better than suburbs.
Well, that is certainly a view. I think we'll just talk past each other on that one.