General population decline trends in the last years is actually a good news.
General population decline trends in the last years is actually a good news.
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If we really thought about it, there will be a raising amount of people who don't have a job and will not be able to get a job ever due to the decline in human labour needs, which lead to fewer jobs being offered globally which means that with fewer humans around there will be a higher chance for people to get a good job.
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Humans consume resources, with less humans around there will be more resources for each humans and they will collectively consume less resources in total.
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Fascinating.
Yo that's great! Less people.means more resources for everyone! More nature, less pollution, less density (which makes crime and such more noticeable)
...but it won't make billionaire as many billions. Unacceptable!
Humans don’t have a modern economic or social model for what is about to happen to most of the developed Western world as well as Russia and China.
Having a smaller cohort of young people means less consumption, fewer children being born. Before you get your dander up screaming about how great that is for the environment. Just remember that fewer young people means the pace of technological change is likely to slow down, there will be fewer young people to support a larger elderly population which will likely mean higher taxes and yet fewer children.
Japan has been going through this process for years. However they were a single developed country in a sea of developed countries that had rising working aged populations. They offshored production to countries with labor pools and were able to position themselves very well because of that. That is not the scenario the rest of the developed world will face.
The world will likely be a very different place in 20 years. Nations historically held together with ethnic majorities that have passed the point of no return to repopulate may no longer exist in that span of time.
Humans don't need a job to survive.
Humans consume resources, with less humans around there will be more resources for each humans and they will collectively consume less resources in total.
This is where you get it wrong, because you haven't actually thought about how much more one human can consume compared to another, and the actual lived reality that households with children tend to consume less than childless households.
We're not living subsistence lifestyles. There are many of us who travel for leisure by airplane, waste more food than is necessary to keep a person fed, throw away or consume more physical goods or energy than we need, create way more pollution, etc.
Rich societies tend to have fewer kids and consume way more resources and emit more pollution. The billions of people in Asia contribute less to our pollution than the comparably smaller population of Western Europe and North America. The relationship between population and environmental impact is broken because one rich Westerner can consume more than literally ten thousand poor Asians.
Yes but the countries expecting or experiencing population decline are high consumption countries, largely.
That's my point. The correlation already runs the other way. As those countries start to see shrinking populations, they'll also continue to consume greater amounts per capita, offsetting the population decrease.
China and South Korea are starting to shrink. Do we really believe that their pollution and resource consumption are going to go down in the next 10 years?
And it doesn't really matter whether we're talking causation in one direction or another, or a spurious correlation with some other confounding factors. The fact is, the highest consumption populations tend to have the lowest birth rates, and vice versa, so why would we expect dwindling births to reduce consumption?
The world population was approximately 4 billion people in 1974. Today it has roughly doubled since then.
Source: https://ourworldindata.org/population-growth-over-time
I agree with you, OP. We need a decrease in population.
Also look at Detroit as an example. One of the reasons they’ve found it tough to rebound is so much Infrastucture for a much bigger population, they can no longer afford to maintain. Nor is it affordable to “downsize” the city. And of course the worst hazards are on the downsize list
If the infinite labor babies stop flowing the infinite capital generation stops too. Can't have that for some reason
I just realized we need to protect farmersonly.com. If anyone should have kids and pass on their knowledge it’s farmers.
What if I told you that knowledge can be passed on to people who aren't your biological descendants?
To pass the knowledge of that exact plot of land and the impact climate change has had on it leading to a shift in growing method, and the thoughts behind the corrections – that would take Dr. Watson or a Vlog maybe.
I recently watched downsizing, whose main topic was overpopulation and I remember a time where there were some papers on that the earth will soon be overcrowded and I'm very happy that this simply won't be an issue for us in the future anymore.
It's both good and bad. In theory more people gives more labor power and we can produce more than we can consume. But today we devastate the natural world and produce too much waste and poison. Birth control helps but sustainable living is the way forward.
Not sure I agree that there will be less human labor "need." Ideally, we should strive for progress, and not just survive. I think there is infinite use for human labor.
I agree with your second point.
I do agree. You can't run the world economy like a pyramid scheme. Not sure there are "too many people" or just technology lag, and I don't believe EVERYTHING is zero sum (we have increased efficiency in a lot of ways, and solar energy & nuclear don't seem like they use as many resources as they provide) but easier on the earth if we don't have as many.
I am not sure it's even an unpopular opinion, though.
Massive downvote from me on this one.
...Because you think it is NOT an unpopular opinion? It sure seems unpopular, judging by the comments.
nope. people are supposed to vote based on what they believe and the votes decide if its popular or unpopular. im downvoting to agree and if enough others do then it won't come up high in the unpopular opinion ranking.
So you don't think it's worth talking about, or you don't like how it's stated? Or are you using votes simply to mark agreement? If it's the last method, that cheapens lemmy.