Yes, this IS fine. There’s too many people on this fucking planet. The only reason this is considered a problem is because capitalism and the Bible says so.
No other reason. Period.
While I half agree with you, that’s definitely not the only issue.
Senior citizens become people to take care of, that won’t/can’t work and I don’t mean that in a “dear God consider the GDP” way, but literally just people who will not be contributing but still require services, in fact likely a lot more than normal.
It ends up being a lot of neglected senior citizens dying in horrible ways.
Senior citizens become people to take care of,
Children need more resources to raise than seniors take.
I suppose if you are just thinking about things like cost of formula, diapers, clothes, education. In terms of time spent, children take less and less one on one time as each year passes. They have a finite timeline of required care.
The elderly become less and less independant, the care they require becomes more and more medical in nature, and there is no timeline. Someone with dementia can require around the clock medical care for decades.
Yes, the medical care is 1000x more than cost of food and things.
An infant requires more constant care than a dying elderly. Parents are on rotation 24/7 for the first year. That’s more than elderly get in hospice.
Moneywise it’s $600k for a child. $400k from parents. $200k from the state for the free k-12 education.
Elderly on average have $200k in savings age 65-74 and spend $155k in medical costs their last 3 years.
Children are more expensive in money and direct labor.
Not really. The unique expense for a kid is education compared to the old, and elder care can easily eclipse that.
The unique expense for a kid is education
Young kids require a lot of health care, tbf
I said unique, old people need a lot of health care, generally way more than a kid. Most kids after birth just have routine checkups and not much else. Infants might get a bit more doctor visits because the parents don’t know if they should worry or not because the infant can’t speak, but generally even those amount to nothing.
Babies more universally need diapers than old folks, and do eat more than an older person, but health care is absolutely bigger for elderly.
Cost per child is $300k, $400k including college. The state (which means workers’ taxes) chip in an average of $17k / year for k-12 which is another $200k. That’s $600k per child, not including the free labor from the parents.
The average savings for someone 65-74 is $200k. End of life costs are $155k for the last 3 years.
So you just said about 20 years of life is only twice that of the last three years of life for your starting figure. Add in college and it’s still not that egregiously more.
You feel the need to add public school costs, but not add in medicare, social security, and other expenses exclusive to old age.
Medicare and SS are prepaid. So you need to figure out the difference between if that money was invested instead of taken in taxes. Then it would be the amount that retires take over that amount.
Please show numbers!
Cost per child is $300k, $400k including college.
Only one in three Millennials have gone to college, so you’ll need to pro-rate this. You’re also talking about a population that begun employment between 14-17, even in an advanced economy like the US. So that cost is offset by revenue, especially in those later years.
…uhh… do you have ANY citation for those numbers?
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/cost-to-raise-a-child-300000-us-state-by-state/
https://educationdata.org/public-education-spending-statistics
I used low numbers of ranges and rounded down.
Not with modern lifespans, 75-95 take a ton of care and are unable to contribute
Average 64-75 have $200k savings and spend $155k for last 3 years.
A child takes $600k. ($300k from parents. $100k college. $200k paid by state to cover the free k-12.)
There’s too many people on this fucking planet.
There’s really not. The human ecological footprint changes enormously by region. Relatively small populations in countries like Qatar and Brunei punch well outside their weight class in terms of ecological devestation.
A much smaller population that lived at this degree of pollution and destruction would be no better globally.
Low birth rates are a crisis for capitalism, not humanity. And if you count brown countries, it’s not even happening.
Pension schemes are not a biological imperative.
Sounds like a situation that will self correct in a few decades, no?
Technically, probably yes, one way or another…
So what’s your alternative? Infinite growth?
Good. There are too many people. Why do we want to expand on a 7billion+ population when so many of us are struggling? How about we only have as many people as we have resources for everyone having a good life?
I’m not arguing for population growth but we definitely have more than enough resources for everyone now. Scarcity isn’t the problem, it’s that we allow people to hoard those resources and we waste a ton of them.
When we can prove it by providing everyone the same (good) standard of life, across the entire world, then I’ll believe it.
Stuff like everyone has housing, clean safe water, safe to eat food, able to escape from extreme climate swings, healthcare, vacation, parental leave, and I’m sure lots more that I’m not thinking of.
Once everyone has that, then we can look at what we can expand on
“We have enough resources” is such a shitty god damned argument. At least you didn’t go “hurr durr everyone on the planet can fit in Manhattan if they just squeeze tightly”.
But god damned ask yourself what kind of world you want to live in, not min maxxing the number of people alive for some absolutely incomprehensible reason.
“WE CAN SQUEEZE ONE MORE IN THERE, BOYS! SHE CAN TAKE IT!”
For WHAT?! WHY?!
everyone on the planet can fit in Manhattan if they just squeeze tightly
But god damned ask yourself what kind of world you want to live in, not min maxxing the number of people alive for some absolutely incomprehensible reason.
Totally with you on these points. Having lived in NYC it is my conception of ultra-urban hell. Sure, there are worse places. Cairo comes to mind. But this idea that we just have to warehouse people to keep them from having massive sprawling impact on the planet is absolutely the most wrong way to think about it, IMO. I hate when people argue that if we just tighten our belts and accept a lower standard of living, everyone can be accommodated with low environmental impact. I go the other way: if there were few enough people (and hoarding/profiteering was curtailed), beachfront and slopeside real estate would be cheap.
You people, I swear. I said specifically that I’m not arguing for increased population and yet your whole response is structured like that’s exactly what I said we should do. Do you even read what you respond to or do you just scan until you find the right key word to launch into a rant?
Well if we could make everyone have a good quality of life and not destroy the environment and at the same time have more people to enjoy life and to help drive innovation and art, it would generally be for the better.
I don’t think you comprehend exactly how large a number 7 billion actually is. There’s plenty of innovation and art potential already.
Currently a good portion of those people are barely surviving and don’t have bandwidth for art or effective innovation. But that’s not really the point. If people are happy and have a good quality of life, and there’s no negatives, then more is better because it’s more happiness.
I’m not arguing against concentration of wealth and hoarding by the ultra-rich, which is obviously a problem, but I have said recently: everyone could live like a modern-day billionaire if there were fewer people.
Too often the argument pivots the other way and turns into: if we all eat plants, live in ultradense cities with dystopian warehousing of people, and nobody has a car, we could be in ecological harmony with 8B+ people. I don’t like that angle.
If “Westerners”, or “the global North”, or “developed countries” are consuming more than “our fair share” of resources while some significant fraction of the 8B+ humans are in poverty, that’s not ideal. On the other hand I want my standard of living to increase, not decrease, and I find making concessions a hard sell.
would it be better if the population was growing past 9bn?
There’s a stable population the ecosystem can support and I’m pretty sure 9bn is too fuckin many.
not that I’m volunteering to free up space tho… there’s a whole lot of techbro chuds who think there’s way too many people, but their motivations are pretty genocidal tbh.
honestly we’re fucked in either direction, but I suspect there’s a lot of reasons the population total will go down once the climate crisis starts shifting millions of people around.
yes growth would be better for me so there are more young people to support the old people
I don’t have enough to give so much to old people
more young people to support the old people
But human labor is incredibly efficienct in the modern day. You don’t need ten young people for every one old person - nine of whom die by their mid-30s - so that everyone doesn’t starve.
But the role of elderly people has changed so much in the last century. On a national scale, they’re no longer master craftsmen or child caregivers or elder advisors. They’re just the base of the consumer economy and the electoral pool.
As democracy fails and the economy becomes more fixated on tech capital than quality of life, they’re marked out as increasingly expendable.
It isn’t that we need more young people so much as we’ve alienated and de-skilled our old people.
selfish prick wants the population to grow so he has more servants at the nursing home
Oh no, who did this? (sarcasm. a few people have gone out of their way to ensure everyone else’s suffering)
Karma for them being dicks.
they’re hiring caregivers like crazy in my state
Unionizing opportunity.
I don’t owe the future anything.
I don’t give a fuck if our species survives. Why should I?
Everything ends someday.
The issue is we don’t just go straight from point A to B, rather there’s a long period of suffering.
It’ll be fine. The baby boom our grandparents cane from was an anomaly
The US baby boom is not really meaningful on a global scale
Sure, but only the inner lips of the labia matter
Minora supremacist
Baby boomers also had more kids than the generation that preceded them. So did Gen X. Millennials are the first to fail to even replace their own population.
They’re slow off the mark, averaging 27-28 for the first child rather than 22.
It is indeed fine. In 1900 there were about 1.6 milliard people, versus the 8.3 today.
Oh no we are running out of people!
ok let’s revolt before it’s too late for the planet then?
Robots will take care of us. Meanwhile we’ll be begging for death and they will keep us alive -_-
What’s your beef sports fan?
