Declining birth rates and house prices dropping are both things the media love to make out are terrible things.
And they just aren't.
this post was submitted on 02 Aug 2026
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I suppose house prices dropping are pretty terrible if you see your house only as an investment, instead of a roof over your head. I know people who would be fucked in their retirement if they house price falls, because they've gambled on their house price climbing enough to carry them through retirement.
I hope they get hurt though. Treating housing as an investment that needs to turn a profit, while people are living on the streets is fucking insane.
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They have to decline or stabalise at fucking point, since we cant have 10 trillion people or something on the planet. Truthfully we just need the brains to figure out how to run our economy without an unending supply of increasing labour.
Some people cannot fathom the concept of limited resources. They think you can increase human population exponentially forever and it'll just work out somehow
We could easily support our current population and quite a bit more if we actually respected and shared our resources responsibly.
Hell, we could increase exponentially forever if we wanted. The universe is practically infinite
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Don't care, I'm not producing wage slaves.
yeah basically. im actually fine with my genetic line going out if the earth goes on with a vibrant biosphere as well.
Spoiler alert: they'll just ban contraception, abortion and sex ed instead
Jokes on them, I’m not having any sex.
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It's not that they're afraid of society collapsing. They clearly don't care about that, as most of what they do ignores that.
What they're worried about is the "Great Replacement", where white people become a minority. If that wasn't what they were really afraid of, then they would consider the problem of declining birth rates to be easily solvable with immigration.
I mean, declining birth rates still cause problems. Even if you're sane and don't give a shit about shifting racial demographics.
Shits gonna be really rough for my generation when we're too old to take care of ourselves, while also outnumbering the young people.
I hear this all the time, and it seems to ignore the glaring elephant in the room. When talking about whether you can keep an economic system going, what matters is not the ratio of workers to retirees, but the ratio of workers to dependents. Yes, we have more old people for each worker, but we also have fewer children. We can simply shift resources from child care to elder care. You manufacture more adult diapers and fewer infant diapers. More nurses go into gerentology than neonatal care. You shift government funding from elementary schools to pensions. More women can stay in the workforce, because fewer of us are having children. And those that do are having fewer of them.
We know that economies can adapt to rapidly growing populations. We've survived baby booms just fine. After WW2, in the US, we suddenly had to care for far more children than our system was ever built to handle. Yet we managed to muddle through it. If we can adapt to a baby boom, we can adapt to a slowly aging population. Capitalism, for all its flaws, does have some benefits. And one of those is that it's pretty efficient at reallocating resources based on changing demand.
And honestly, there are some real upsides to declining population. We can ease our impact on the environment. The real cost of housing will decline. Scarcer workers will see their wages rise. This is the real reason the billionaires are so afraid of a declining population. They need millions of desperate people struggling just to scrape by. Do you think Amazon could run its hellish warehouses the way it does if the cost of housing was half what it currently is?
That all assumes people will not be living longer in the future.
The real cost of housing will decline.
Children generally live with their parents. We'd have to all start living with our elderly parents for it to be the same in terms of housing costs.
This is the real reason the billionaires are so afraid of a declining population. They need millions of desperate people struggling just to scrape by. Do you think Amazon could run its hellish warehouses the way it does if the cost of housing was half what it currently is?
You shouldn't assume billionaires are that intelligent. A huge amount of money has been invested into AI on the promise that it will take away people's jobs. billionaires are emotionally driven idiots. They learned from Jack Welch that if you cut jobs, line goes up. Therefore if you cut half of all the jobs, line goes up big. They're small minded people that don't think in terms of how the economy functions, they only care about their businesses.
If it were the case billionaires had some over arching plan for the economy, then Jeff Bezos would be thinking that if everyone were more prosperous, people would be buying more stuff from Amazon, wouldn't he?
They just want a bigger percentage of the pie, they don't care if the entire pie is smaller and in absolute terms a smaller percent of a bigger pie is more than a larger percent of a smaller pie. Why would they? They already have more money than they could ever spend, so they're obsessed with having more power than their competitors. Racking up a high score and gaining more power.
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The world is literally on fire due to climate change, numerous wars and conflicts with global repercussions, and everything is getting more expensive, while people see that politics - which is supposed to serve society - is subservient only to its masters in the business world. Overpopulation has also become an increasingly pressing issue. The outlook is bleak. Why on earth would anyone want to bring children into this real-life dystopia and deliberately subject them to this?!
20 years ago my wife and decided it was not going to happen and back then it was like. thinks don't look like they are going well economically and with the environment and our personal finances just aren't adding up. fast forward to now and best decision ever. It was debatable 20 years ago but now you have to be crazy.
Quite honestly, I doubt that has any bearing on it. Realistically speaking, it wasn't that much better during the cold war, and that generation had kids. And climate change is not something most people plan their groceries around, let alone their future family.
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Because the alternative is just letting your gene line or even the whole species die? Theres also some people that still believe, and probably can succeed, that they can raise kids resilient enough to face those challenges and brave enough to tackle them. If in 40 years governments finally wanna do something about climate change, they're gonna need some younger hands and boots on the ground to get it done.
Not all of us were raised in a decent life. There are people who grew up in war, slavery, and all sorts of worse shit. They eventually escaped and made a decent life for themselves. Why wouldn't they believe their children could do the same?
In 40 years, correcting course will be even harder than it is today. Climate change is a compounding problem. Once the ice sheets are gone, they're not coming back in any time scale we can imagine.
raise kids resilient enough to face those challenges and brave enough to tackle them.
Just kicking the can down the road, like all the generations before us. I'm imagining the Lion King scene, except instead of showing Simba a bountiful wilderness to inherent, it's a scene full of trash under a burning sky.
"Everything the light touches will be yours to fix. Good luck."
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Yes, just let the gene line die who cares we're not that special, humanity won't mourn our loss. That's all part of the brainwashing, like you have to have kids because your parents and grandparents did? Of course not, live life as you see fit doesn't matter that your ancestors chose what was best for them.
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Reality check. We are in ZERO danger of extinction. Our population could decline by 95%, and there would still be more humans alive than when Julius Caesar walked the Earth. Extinction would take millennia. But even then, there are built in safe guards that make declining below a certain population level impossible.
For a start, consider natural selection. societies are not homogeneous. Some groups reproduce at above replacement, some below. In the US for example, if we just assume birth rates remain the same for all groups indefinitely, never returning to an average replacement rate? In that unlikely scenario, extinction still will not happen. The Amish and the Mormons shall inherit the Earth.
And this can happen for cultural practices, not just religious groups. Maybe multi-generational households will become more common through natural selection. Maybe it will become the norm for people to have children right after high school, while still living with their parents. You only go to college and start your career after having some kids. Each generation pays to raise their own grandchildren, rather than their own children.
And even without cultural selection, eventually technological decline will prevent extinction. What technology your society can wield is a function of its population. As your population shrinks, your society's technological complexity decreases. Eventually you can no longer manufacture mechanized farming equipment, so more people have to work the land again. And on traditional family farms, children are an economic resource that pay for themselves. So the birth rate recovers. And of course, reliable birth control is the product of industrial production. Eventually your population shrinks enough that you are no longer capable of running a birth control factory.
I don't want to see the country become entirely Amish or to see us collapse back to 18th century levels of technology. But these are just the worst case scenarios. The absolute worse case scenario is that population declines by 90-95% and we regress technologically to some 18th century equivalent. Not a future I want to see, but it would hardly be the end of the world. Our present industrial civilization would be remembered as an unsustainable historical aberration, a temporary population boom brought on by the era of cheap hydrocarbons.
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While I understand the reason why a demographic dropout would be a catastrophe, I fucking hate how they say it's our fault, when they were the ones who fucked up everything in the first place
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We are in a shitty pay to win permadeath coop mmorpg where the game balance has been totally broken by indivualistic whales. Of course no new players want to subscribe to this shit.
Yup. I'm just one private citizen. The replacement ratio of my country's population is not my responsibility. 🤷♂️
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It's interesting because it's obvious that the reason why people are having less children is because they can't afford it and they don't think it's a good idea for the children.
However, rather than actually remedying this situation, the people who want us to have as many children as humanly possible so they have more workers are doing everything in their power to make life worse.
The rich already decided they don't want to prevent this, they'd rather just replace everyone underneath them. That's why the AI bubble just won't pop even though its a blackhole for money
in a way, this is my username:
Epicurus rejected any possibility of an afterlife, while still contending that one need not fear death: "Death is nothing to us; for that which is dissolved, is without sensation, and that which lacks sensation is nothing to us."[72] From this doctrine arose the Epicurean Epitaph: Non fui, fui, non sum, non curo ("I was not; I was; I am not; I do not care."), which is inscribed on the gravestones of his followers and seen on many ancient gravestones of the Roman Empire.[73]
We're too close to matrix timeline for that. People will be pushed financially to sell their sperm and eggs to the government or a corporation for money so they can survive and that corporation will then grow a new generation of AI prompt givers.
We will also see things like further pushes against abortion, more lenient rape laws and other awful shit to pump up the births. There could also be importing births from other countries in the form of immigration. As we've seen with climate change, governments and corporations ultimately won't care about declining births regardless of how unsustainable it is.
There's been a rash of people like Elon Musk posting rants about "declining birth rates in the developing world" (and sometimes dog whistling while at it) - getting upset that contrary to the worries of Malthus and Ehrlich, it turns out humans are not the same as bacteria in a petri dish just exponentially reproducing until they exhaust all the carrying capacity of their environment. Instead, it seems that those of us that are in paradigms where we have relatively high per capita energy and materials consumption, respond to economic, cultural and environmental stimuli, and slow our roll once we feel we are at an "x" threshold of population density and environmental & economic stress.
Given that we live on a finite planet with finite resources this small bit of self control might just be what saves humanity from a truly dystopian future.
What the demographic shift of less younger workers versus more retiring seniors does mean is that our systems of depending on constant growth of consumption for our faith in our currency and financial institutions, and for providing for government guaranteed retirement funding, both end up under threat - but those issues could still be easily fixed simply by allowing more immigration from the multitude of places on this globe that still have relatively high birth rates, that have plenty of people with strong work ethics seeking greater opportunities.
allowing more immigration from the multitude of places on this globe
But then the immigrants will take all the jobs and also not work and take all the money from citizens.
Do you even FOX bro?
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best we can do is Ministry of Love
Okay I’m gonna play devil’s advocate, it’s worrying because we are not adapting our system.
I’ve always thought over population is a big issue but when I found out how our social security is intentionally a Ponzi scheme, it made me very worried.
I don’t give two shits about the replacement theory but I’m worried that I am getting paid shit throughout my adult life since labour isn’t expensive yet but ~~when~~ if I need to retire, labour could become super expensive.
Of course a sane society would just use all the excess wealth today to invest in automation but if we were sane, a lot of things would be better.
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Alternatively they can assure more children by crashing the economy so hard people will be forced to have like 9 children so that there's a chance that at least 2 of them can take care of their parents when they get old.
That's how Trump decided to make America great again. It's gonna be frontier lynchings, robber barons and slave trades all over again.
Make the US 3rd world again.
Oh you're finally finding out? Oh noooooo all that fucking around for nothing. Oops.
I don't think over population is the issue or under. It's the dated, old systems we continue to rely on. I think we have a energy, and transport problem. We are scaling 1800s and 1900s tech. Instead of innovating modern approaches. We have a systems issues.
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