What is normal?

The labor market is a market. It is regulated by supply and demand. The good being traded for money is human labor.

If supply goes down (fewer workers being born), prices go up; that means, higher wages.

If supply goes up (more workers being born), prices go down; that means, lower wages.

Fortunately population numbers are returning to sane levels, and doing so without bloodshed, famine or diseases. What a fortune.

Is this fair?

Is this sane?

The world needs more babies.

Does it?

Or do we just need to embrace migrants?

“A reduction in the share of workers can lead to labor shortages, which may raise the bargaining power of employees and lift wages — all of which is ultimately inflationary,” Simona Paravani-Mellinghoff, managing director at BlackRock, wrote in an analysis last year.

"Have babies," said the billionaire, "or else who am I going to exploit in the future?"

There's no economic reason the nominal GDP of any country or the world in general has to continuously increase. The important metric is per capita production. As long as people get continuously more productive through innovation, standards of living will continue to increase.

At the national level, vying for long term economic power in the world, a higher and younger population is going to be a huge advantage very soon and countries should be trying to get as many immigrants in their borders as they can. But instead they are...going a different direction.

Does anybody think about the fact that every year on average 9-10 million people die every year from starvation and malnutrition related deaths. The vast majority of these numbers are children under 5 years old. The 9-10 million number was pre-covid. There was an uptick due to the supply chain issues. I think I read an article saying the number for 2021 was around 14 million. Again, mostly children.

It's mostly kids in 3rd world Africa, middle east, India, etc.

We over here need to have more kids though. Because profits.

Idk I just think all this is dumb. Fuck capitalism and the system we have. It's all fucked.

Oh no. Not the economy.

It is a basic math problem.. they keep raising housing prices ain't nobody going to have kids when 1500 in rent is due monthly

Many Boomers voted their progeny away when they put Reagan in office.

There are more people in the world than ever before and we have folks writing news stories telling us there's a crisis building and that we need to have more kids?

They're farming us like ranch animals.

Turns out that whole idea of women being the primary bearers of hundred of years of exploited reproductive labor might have had some weight to it, huh.

All that labor being redirected into "L'economie" means that, at base, you'll have less children.

The best way you can help fight climate change is to not have children.

"A reduction in the share of workers can lead to labor shortages, which may raise the bargaining power of employees and lift wages — all of which is ultimately inflationary,” Simona Paravani-Mellinghoff, managing director at BlackRock, wrote in an analysis last year.

And while net immigration has helped offset demographic problems facing rich countries in the past, the shrinking population is now a global phenomenon. “This is critical because it implies advanced economies may start to struggle to ‘import’ labour from such places either via migration or sourcing goods,” wrote Paravani-Mellinghoff.

This is just mask-off capitalism. They want people to have a lot of babies, and/or large numbers of poor and desperate people migrating into the country, so that they have a constant, reliable source of cheap labor.

The problem with capitalism, is eventually you run out of other people's labor

Half my life was spent fearing the result of limitless population growth and contemplating the inevitability of war and famine to shock population levels back down to sustainable levels. They warned us about this starting at least as far back as the sixties.

I see organic population collapse as a categorically good thing.

Remember kids, "the economy" is double-speak for "record breaking profits for the rich".

Good, lower OECD birth rates means member countries can open the borders more for immigrants looking for better prospects, better compensation and benefits for jobs in high cost of living areas, and less stupid hiring processes. Every labor shortage is a capital shortage. Also notice how CNN quotes executives and no labor leaders.

Infinite growth is an absolutely insane bar to set for the economy.

The lowered birthrates are because we're getting ground into dust - my engineering team of twenty millennials has two folks with kids and two folks who openly plan on having kids... we're aging out of the window and it's not that we're trying and failing - most of us just don't want a fucking family. We're too fucking busy already.

Looks like not having kids in protest of how shitty things are is working. Everyone keep it up.

HEY WORLD LEADERS: make the world a less shitty place, so I don’t feel guilty about bringing a child into it, and I’ll rawdog more often. Do we have a deal?

Less people means less stress on the environment though.

Sounds awesome. Bring it on. Less people is better fuck the infinite growth economy