this post was submitted on 26 Nov 2025
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I mean, yes but also a massive portion of our entire society is propped up on the back of capitalism whether we like it or not, we can't pull the rug out from the hospitals, the services, people's food and so on. There are a lot of people who think that a population crash will be good for us but if system crashes too fast, it won't be an issue of not having new iphones and labubu's, it will be an issue of not having antibiotics and rubber products like the washers in syringes and the company that makes the single bearing you need to keep your heater on in winter closed their doors years ago and the grocery store is almost empty and you haven't heard any noise from your elderly neighbor's house in three days, and is that gunfire again? It's not an apocalyptic event but a withering of life and progress.
The damage that a collapse can cause can outweigh any long-term benefits and even last too long and hard for any better systems to even have a chance of taking root. Our logistics network is simultaneously the most impressive thing we've ever built and the most fragile, and it's also what we rely on to a degree that should have scared everyone when a single cargo ship blocking a canal almost brought the world to a stop.
I am just trying to say that it's a real issue that every nation is going to have to start bracing for with the same gravity as climate change because the consequences can lead to a lot of unnecessary suffering. I wish more people other than the very worst people were taking it seriously and preparing for the strain.
Oh absolutely without actual government action the overall population decline will be catastrophic. Basically if it's handled the way that climate change has been, our kids/grandkids/great-grandkids will be screwed because it's a similarly significant world-wide challenge for humanity that like climate change will require some changes to how people live and run the world. However, unlike climate change, population decline won't necessarily kill off humanity entirely, because it will self-resolve one way or another, either by society collapsing due to the medical system collapsing or by actual social change to adapt to the normalizing population level