this post was submitted on 25 May 2025
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This is deeply myopic. The problem is not low birth rates, but uneven demographics.
How does, let's say, marxism leninism deal with the problem of uneven demographic distribution? I've never heard of any even theoretical fixes from them for that.
https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/CHN/china/birth-rate -- do you think China doesn't view this as a problem?
How does Marxist leninism deal with this uniquely capitalist problem? I wonder how the factory owners under communism will make a profit under these conditions?
Silly
It's more a uniquely hierarchical problem than a uniquely capitalist problem. Any hierarchy is made more powerful by having more people at the lower levels, so any long-lived hierarchical social system is likely to run itself into a population cliff at some point. So, as some forms of communism embrace hierarchy, some forms of communism are susceptible to this issue too.
I can get behind that
You have missed the point in spectacular fashion.
The issue isn't who will work in the factories, it's who will support the elderly population if there are so few people working. In any society, the old are supported by the young.
That issue is trivial to solve. We simply stop wasting so much labor. Labor has been cheap for a long time. That's resulted in companies using it very inefficiently. Think of all those office workers that lose half their day to pointless unproductive meetings that could have been an email. Companies can only exist with such comically inefficient practices because labor is cheap.
Higher labor costs will encourage them to use labor more efficiently. The total economic output need not decrease. There will still be plenty of resources available to take care of the elderly. We'll just stop wasting so much labor.
Except we do have ai and robots now. This isn’t every other generation in history, we are dealing with gigantic changes. That said, we need better standards about when to end lives. Everyone shouldn’t be kept alive forever. It’s not healthy or natural. My grandparents all died in nursing homes at like 100. Their quality of life was shit. That’s not how to deal with the problem of aging.
I think you're missing some essential point of basic economics if you think this problem doesn't affect communist societies. I specifically mean the problem of demographic imbalance, not the problem of "infinite growth" which communism does at least try to solve, and free-market capitalism doesn't actually view as a problem really.