"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.
Paying workers more is inflationary, but raising the cost of goods because you control the supply chain is “business”
Basically, raising product costs to cover increased labour costs are bad because actual workers are getting that money instead of the wealthy capital class.
I wish people understood boycotting more. Sure 6 companies own everything, but remember when the cost of a barrel of oil went significantly negative because people weren’t driving for 2 weeks?
If people collectively decided they didn’t want to buy anything but the absolute necessary staples for a few months there would be an absolute catastrophe in the supply chain and they’d be forced to lower prices significantly.
They may not lower prices forever, but modern business is built entirely on supply chain logistics. If people stop buying anything, or buy things exclusively to return them we would see some serious changes
I knew even before I opened the article it’s gonna be about fewer babies = fewer workers. Remember folks, when an article cites the “economy”, it just means the businesses and industries’ profits.
You know what slows down inflation? An upper limit on the cost of goods. But hey im just a filthy commie.
It didn’t, not in the US, not in Soviet Union
In the Soviet Union it caused rationing instead. Here’s your coupon for 1 stick of butter
Sure buddy those are the only two countries that have existed in the world. So can’t work anywhere.
It doesn’t work because it’s a stupid idea.
If there’s a cap on the price of a type of good, then obviously only the lowest quality things get made. If you cap shoes to $10, they will only sell shoes imported from sweatshops.
If you specify exactly how something is made, like $20 for made in USA shoes, they will import it from a sweatshop and sew a logo on it in the US.
If you specify how much labor must be done in the US, there’s a chance nobody would bother since selling the $10 sweatshop shoe has better profit margins
Yeah thats not how the prices are set tho so your entire premise and basis is stupid. Have a good day. Do some reading.
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.
Mental health never being addressed, so we’re also too tired.
“Burned outs just another word for not taking your bosses shit” - sing it to the tune of Me and Bobby McGee.
Viruses, Pyramid Schemes and Capitalism, oh my!
Remember kids, “the economy” is double-speak for “record breaking profits for the rich”.
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.
Infinite growth requires infinite bodies to feed it.
Unfortunately I don’t have infinite fucks to give
I think our planet would be described as a free-range human labour farm, to anyone who was able to view it independently. Well, lots of it not so free-range. Its why they’re coming for reproductive freedom. They’re doing for the same reason a beef farmer wouldn’t give their cows reproductive freedom.
Look at long term trends, population is already dropping in East Asia and Europe
Sure, there might be more people in Nigeria, but they are not paying into your retirement
Yeah maybe this way of handling retirement doesn’t work? It’s clearly a pyramid scheme.
Obviously, but how do you fix it without getting more workers? No scheme would work without people doing work.
Society needs farmers and doctors. Like it or not, everything else is optional.
Where are you going to get new doctors if everyone in your society is 70 years old
Nurses are now optional? EMTs? Firefighters? Military personnel? Police?
I’m talking about necessary for the species to carry on existing. And yes I grew up in a place with no police, no military, no EMTs, no firefighters. We had a nurse though. If someone did something that would normally involve the police, it was settled by the parties involved. (If you got drunk and drove through someone’s fence, they’d show you up at your house with a roll of barbed wire and some fence posts and you’d have to fix it. Possibly also round up any escaped sheep)
Enjoy being conquered by another country if you don’t have a military. Sure, the species will survive, but you may not
The problem with capitalism, is eventually you run out of other people’s labor
Capitalism is just a complex pyramid scheme. Change my mind.
No, you’re correct.
You run out of other people’s money. You can squeeze labor to starvation working in a salt mine. However, if most all people lose all their money, capitalism is done, and currently runaway capitalism is doing everything it can to increase that disparity.
This person was referencing the obtuse and infuriatingly repeated quote from Margaret Thatcher (rot in piss) “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money”.
I don’t think I need to point out exactly why this quote is stupid.
I had no idea she said that. No, I’m not a Thatcher fan.
Then falling birthrate shouldn’t be an issue?
Looks like not having kids in protest of how shitty things are is working. Everyone keep it up.
We are all Lysistrata now
The solution is obviously to take away womens’ reproductive rights. Duh.
The best way you can help fight climate change is to not have children.
This statement always reminds me of the movie Idiocracy.
Fortunately, intelligence appears to have a wide range of genetic factors. Stupid parents can have quite intelligent children.
The documentary, at this point.
In a world with too many humans already, can you imagine painting a drop in the birth rate as somehow a bad thing?
lol
I don’t really care about its impact on the economy, but I do feel for those who are attempting to have a child to no avail. I can only imagine how soul crushing that process can be.
Where do you live where the economy doesn’t affect you?
I don’t, those people are selfish. Creating an unwilling life destined to be yet another cog in the machine while the world burns just to satisfy one’s own animalistic desire to have some form of genetic spawn. I silently cheer every time “struggling” couples miscarry and are unwittingly forced to do the right thing and not have kids.
Lmao what is this edge-lord shit?
MFW my parents didn’t even attempt to invent a time machine to ask if it was cool to conceive me or not
Those people do not share your perspective. I do view it as largely subconsciously selfish, but your take is fucked up.
My take is fucked up only because we continue to ascribe reproduction as some noble, precious thing; rather than a wildly irresponsible and selfish act.
Imagine a couple is driving a truckload of garbage to dump in the ocean. They have no reason to do this except some primal instinct that tells them to, all so they can point at the pile of floating garbage afterwards and say “look, that is MY garbage”.
Now imagine on the way to the ocean, the truck loses a tire and they crash off the road next to a garbage dump, and all the garbage in their truck goes flying over the fence and into the dump.
Then these people want and expect sympathy from others because they lost their garbage. They were really looking forward to standing on the beach and watching their garbage float free into the ocean and cause more of a mess. Oh no, boo hoo, fate accidentally caused them to do the right thing.
Lol. There is nothing in existence which has a choice of its being thrown into existence. Is all existence immoral?
The problem is the average age increases, and you’ll have more of an elderly population, meaning barely any people actually working while a ton of people are on pensions
Then invest in medical research on keeping me young for longer, instead of keeping me old for longer
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?”
Or, better yet, do we need to embrace the idea that infinite growth isn’t possible, and adopt economic systems that do not rely on it?
We need the opposite of more babies
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.
I really have no idea what these sentences mean. I feel like I’m having a stroke. Is it just me?
Women have been responsible for most of the domestic labor throughout history. Over the last 100 years or so, economies have changed so that women were first able to work outside of the home, then expected to work outside the home, and now need to work outside of the home. (E.g., a single-income household can’t pay the minimum bills in most places in the US.)
But doing labor outside the home means that labor can’t be done inside the home, because time is a finite resource; if you’re working 40 hours a week (plus commuting time), that’s 40 hours you don’t have for raising a family. That makes raising a family significantly more difficult.
The solution is to change the structure of the economy so that it’s entirely reasonably possible to raise a family on a single income without living in grinding poverty.
Yeah but how’s that supposed to maximise wealth extraction by our economic overlords?
Well, TBF it’s hard to maximize profit when you’re head is in a basket in front of the guillotine, sooooooooo I guess they need to figure shit out before then?
Billionaires are like an appendix. They don’t really do anything but as long as everything works normally no-one cares, but right now they’re causing a lot of pain and have to be removed. Society will function as normal just like your gut post appendectomy.
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
How is your rent so cheap?
I haven’t rented in years, luckily I found something that wasn’t dumb expensive and I’ve slowly been fixing it up
$1500 a month? I wish!
Sounds awesome. Bring it on. Less people is better fuck the infinite growth economy
Many Boomers voted their progeny away when they put Reagan in office.
How is this a fertility issue? Are people unable to have children, or just unwilling?
I think the consensus is that it’s mostly as a result of women having greater reproductive choices, greater access to family planning services, and more women choosing to delay having children or choosing to not have children at all, often so they can instead focus on a career.
Edit: I want to point out that what I’m describing is the consensus, as I understand it, of mainstream experts in the US. However, I believe there is evidence that this consensus opinion is not entirely accurate. If I’m not mistaken, surveys indicate that there are a fair number of people who would like to have children but are not because the right circumstances are not present for them to feel secure enough to have children. Many of the people who are not having children would have them if they felt more financially, romantically, and/or emotionally secure. Therefore, it’s possible that it’s not so much that people are choosing not to have children as it is that the necessary conditions for making people feel secure enough to have children are not present for a large number of people.
