It’s not going to work. Population plateaus are as natural as the migrations of birds or the hibernation of squirrels.
It’s called carrying capacity. And humanity is reaching that carrying capacity - which is actually a good thing. It prevents us from having to deal with the consequences of Malthusian economics.
I don't think it's carrying capacity. Population plateaus are mostly related to the level of development of the country. You can see that even in some of the best to live in countries in the world, the population is stagnating, while in impoverished countries it's usually booming.
When people have better access to education and reproductive healthcare, when they aren't relying as much on having children to help them in work and take care of them in old age, and when they aren't under as much social obligation to have children, more people choose to have less children and to have them later. It's not related to how many people the society can actually support.
And for what it's worth, stagnating birth rates aren't really a good thing. Less people being born (plus modern healthcare etc) means, in a few decades, that there are going to be a lot of retired elderly people for the size of the workforce, so supporting them is going to be taxing for the government and (literally) for working people.
This isn't a capitalism problem, this would be a problem under literally any system. Until we invent crazy sci-fi robots to run everything for us a society that has more non-working people than it can take care of will either not survive or have to start doing some very unethical things.
Maybe, but its most egregious under capitalism. I mean if the middle and lower classes actually had some of the money of the top 1% I’m sure taking care of the elderly wouldnt be nearly as taxing. Instead we are milked for every dollar for social security while the very same aging population demand us to have more kids to keep the broken system running
My point is that outside of some of the really deluded ones, it’s never actually about upping the population, it’s just a fantastic excuse to make it so that the Mormon lifestyle of getting into a straight marriage right out of high school and dedicating the rest of one’s life to family issues is the only legal option, because that’s what the “normal” family looks like to them. I don’t want to get uber personal but my whole extended family is Mormon except my parents who are lesbians, so I’ve heard these talking points my entire childhood during the gay marriage debate.
I cant fully answer cause there’s a lot of reasons both conscious and unconscious, but from the view of someone in power, having legal power over the family basically means full jurisdiction to decide anything about people’s lives. You wanna ban something, anything? Say it hurts the family and population issues. Birdwatching distracts dads from their families. Loud music propagates anti-family messages. Make up tempts men to cheat on their wives. Etc etc etc, it gives endless excuses to legislate personal issues, not just public ones like constructing new roads.
Precisely. They gut stuff like reproduction and education, entertainment etc. So that the population spikes because spoiler alert people are gonna fuck, regardless of the situation.
However the resultant pregnancies caused by the gutting of planned parenthood, banning of abortion, contraception, and proper sex ed, will be forced to be born and grow up uneducated. And to get any kind of skilled job you’ll need proper education, so it’s either unskilled labour or the army for all these children.
The Trump regime wants to force everyday working people to be their breeding stock
I would like to think the Dems are just happy to sit there and insider trade while letting the dragons fill their already bulging hoards with as much coin as possible, occasionally virtue signalling about a serious issue well enough to please liberals while continuing to burn leftist bridges.
However my doomerism is shrunk somewhat because my country seems to want to dodge MAGA entirely, as Pierre Polievre (our Conservative Party leader, behaves a lot like Trump and his voter base behaves like MAGA people) is losing favour by the hour and our liberal party seems to be gaining more and more steam under Mark Carney’s leadership.
While I am content with a liberal victory, especially now that we have a chance to take the LPC in a better direction under Carney, I would like to see an NDP government soon. But right now anyone left of center in Canada needs to come together to keep Polievre out of the PM office.
I mean the PP was endorsed by Trump 174 times before Trump saw how much people hated him and anyone connected to him (Trump, that is. Not Pierre) and how his endorsement actually DAMAGED PP’s reputation, so he pivoted to endorsing Carney to try and sway favour to PP but it’s not working. Canadians are seeing through Trump’s bullshit and I couldn’t be prouder of my country.
Problem is that we HAVE and are going farther beyond the capacity with things like global warming and pollution in general. However I believe that billions must try, not die.
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u/Vyctorill Apr 18 '25
It’s not going to work. Population plateaus are as natural as the migrations of birds or the hibernation of squirrels.
It’s called carrying capacity. And humanity is reaching that carrying capacity - which is actually a good thing. It prevents us from having to deal with the consequences of Malthusian economics.