781
Japan ‘on verge of no longer functioning’ after birth rate plummets to record new low
(www.independent.co.uk)
this post was submitted on 01 Mar 2025
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Sorry, can't do that under capitalism perpetual growth
line must go up forever
I know the left really (and rightfully) hates capitalism, but this isn't a capitalism problem; it's a society problem. You'll always need a certain amount of labor to sustain non-working portions of the populations. Thanks to advances in technology the necessary working person percentage is decreasing but you still can't have the majority of the population be elderly people who will never again be productive.
Other system are more stable, Egypt lasted for thousands of years, the Ottoman Empire was fairly stable without growth for a 1000. Capitalism is the the system were part of the profit is reinvested into new machinery 'for efficiency' to undercut competition. Once we do not have competition because there are only 2 or 3 companies (Coke and Pepsi), they fix prices and work to corrupt government to become an Oligarchy. This is why people make the state that we are entering a 'post capital' world.
It's called "ancient Egypt" for convenience's sake, but it's not just one continuous state; it's many states that either succeeded or competed with each other as the country went through cycles of rise, decline, fragmentation and reunification. For a more familiar example think of it as another, much smaller China.
Uh... No?
The boundaries changed, plagues came through. But politically it was mostly stable-ish of sorts ¯_(ツ)_/¯ as an economic system
Warning: swear language ahead
Da fuck "productive" is, for fuck's sake. Anyone thought of not running human intelligence into fucking ground over a period of... what? Roughly 60 - 20 = 40 years?
Or what, humans can't think after retirement age because ?
You absolutely can have any percentage of , provided human wellbeing is being taken care of, constantly and in all aspects
Be productive as in literally just that: produce the goods society uses to sustain itself. Intelligence is only one part of the equation here (the rest of it being energy, physical wellness, etc), and even that deteriorates shortly after retirement age when people enter their 70s.
Also I have no issue with swear words, but just spamming them doesn't substitute for an actual basis for your argument. Unless you want 70 YO people to work factory production lines, they are for all societal purposes unproductive.
I've got flash news then: unless I want 70 years old people to work production lines, my job (a developer) can be done by a seventy years old person. Or a job of an artist. Or . Physical strength does naturally deteriorate, and that is the only thing that actually ~~is~~ does.
Now, to the more important: producing goods? Really? Since when has it become the only thing you look at? And since when producing goods is something only people-under-random-age-limit can do?
I think it's entirely possible if we reduce waste and redistribute wealth. The US pays farmers to NOT grow food to keep the price up. Total insanity.
If wage growth went up at the same rate as GDP, one part time worker could support multiple elderly people.
Then prices would have to go up at the same rate, and one part time worker would not be able to support multiple elderly people at a reasonable quality of life. It's not about money; under capitalism money is a shorthand for how much power one has in and over society and isn't directly convertible into useful goods at a constant rate. What you need to be looking at is total productivity, because that's the bottleneck here. If X working people can only make Y things a day and X+Z people need 2Y things a day to survive then a society with X working people and Z non-working people can't survive.
I get what you're saying, but I feel like you are ignoring how much automation has allowed one person to do the work of many in the recent past. If allowed, this should continue to improve.
Edit: by recent past I mean the last 50-80 years.