Birthstriking is the biggest middle finger one can possibly give to capitalism and to the corrupt establishment that enforces it through violence. It is the strongest action available to the average person, a direct vote against the future that we are headed towards.
They know this, which is why they are freaking out with tons of propaganda, attacks on education, and erosion of women’s rights.
Birth rates below replacement level do present some actual challenges to society. But instead of trying to actually address these issues, they are going for the band-aid of increasing birth rates.
They only care about birth rate so that labor is devalued.
Historians argue that one of the contributing factor to the end of feudalism was the black death, because the laborers left had more bargaining power then before over the nobles/clergy to make demands like tenancy, humanistic values etc.
But the moment where AI is able to replace whole industries is when these sob stories will vanish, and in good conscience, who can have a kid when those are their prospects?
This isn’t like the industrial revolution where people were just upskilled and shifted into other domains, there’s only so many hospitality and service oriented jobs which can support the labor force writ large.
that is why countries wont even dare discuss why its occuring instead trying to low effort coerce people into having more children.
I think some in this thread do not fully realize what some of the inherent problems of capitalism are and how they relate to this issue.
In a capitalist economy resources and labour are generally allocated in a way that maximizes profit. Profit is determined based on the prices of things and prices are determined by the exchange value of those things. That often results in the price of something being way higher than what it cost to make it. One result of this is that capitalist economies allocate enormous amount of resources and labour to things that don’t have any beneficial value to society. For example, some of the most skilled labour in America is tasked with figuring out how to get as many people as possible to spend as much time as possible looking at anger-inducing content on their phones. This isn’t contributing in any meaningful, positive way to solving society’s known, difficult long term problems, like ageing population. In fact it likely does the opposite.
In contrast, a socialist economy allocates resources and labour according to society’s needs, which are determined by some mix of economic planning and limited market dynamics. Prices of things are determined through these processes and generally represent how much labour goes into them. As a result, keeping people angry wouldn’t get many skilled engineers allocated to. Instead these people’s labour would for example be employed in automating the shit out of the vital sectors for society’s long term well-being. Like automation in agriculture, healthcare and elder care. And then since labour isn’t allocated or paid on the basis of profit, the socialist economy can keep labour employed in sectors where proven automation already exists and gradually ramp up automation as they retire. Alternatively it could let people retire earlier, or have them do other work if they want to, like community service, or art, or R&D, or childcare, etc. As a result a socialist economy has a better ability to sustain itself with less labour while taking care of its elderly, without enduring crises.
Worse, a capitalist economy has to go through the real material changes, actually allocating labour and resources, producing the things it would produce with its current configuration in order for it to figure out what to change and what to do next. Thus we’re faced with the horror of all these bad decisions that we currently see basically locked-in and consuming vast resources and labour until they become unprofitable or resources or labour are exhausted. Which means we’re very likely to run into crises before the system adjusts to the new realities of diminished labour force. And then we’d likely (as we already are) rush into solving that by importing labour, which is going to get us into social instability due to racism, and we know how that goes. There are plenty current examples to go around. Meanwhile an economy that can do planning can model ahead of time what different future economic configurations would look like, make projections, choose a desired one and have resources and labour allocated on solutions today, thus increase the chances of avoiding acute socioeconomic crises or minimize their scale.
I hope this helps understanding the premise.
And for today’s misallocation of resources in capitalism I give you - https://sh.itjust.works/comment/18820691.
In contrast, a socialist economy allocates resources and labour according to society’s needs, which are determined by some mix of economic planning and limited market dynamics.
The only problem being, that while nice in theory, socialist economies never actually did that in practice. Since humanity has never figured out, how to actually do economic planning in some centralized or semi-centralized way without being very inefficient and corrupt. I used to think AI could do that one day, but I guess that was too optimistic…
It’s easy to see capitalism is terrible. It’s hard to see a better system, that could replace it.
Since humanity has never figured out, how to actually do economic planning in some centralized or semi-centralized way without being very inefficient and corrupt. I used to think AI could do that one day, but I guess that was too optimistic…
The big national retailers already operate as central planners.
I don’t think that’s true.
Central planning ran the USSR and its satellites for some 40-70 years. They didn’t even have computes for the majority of this period and many of these economies experienced high rates of growth. If I remember correctly, the USSR speedran economic development so that the GDP per cap of the USSR increased 10 times between the beginning and the end of the experiment. The US grew about 3 times during the same period while being the main world hegemon, profiting from the vast majority of the world. Of course there were problems, like the famines in the 30s, but they didn’t repeat post-WWII. It’s not like capitalism hasn’t caused famines around the world either. So despite the standard criticism, I don’t think planning did poorly overall.
China is also demonstrating how long term central economic planning allows to build an economy efficiently, with a long term focus and avoiding most crises capitalist economies experience on regular basis. They’re clearly leading in development of solutions to climate change in a way that is above and beyond any other economy, in solar, wind, battery and EV production. Just earlier this month we saw their emissions fall despite higher electricity usage for the first time. And they’re powering a lot of everyone else’s renewables transition. Then on the ageing front, they’re already doing a lot of manufacturing automation. I read they’re also doing farming automation now. Apparently DJI’s other job is spraying fleets for example. I don’t know much about healthcare and elder care but I imagine they’re either working on reducing labour needs or planning on it. So yeah, while we’re afraid of automation because we know we’ll be left jobless and/or deskilled by the capital owners (even if it eventually leads to a crisis), them socialist fkers don’t have that problem. The more they automate, the less population they need to maintain and grow their standard living, the cheaper they can manufacture what they make, the easier the ageing population problem becomes. Given how many universities they’re opening each year, growing the highly skilled research labour share, I think they’re only going to accelerate these trends.
One more thing about planning - the largest capitalist corporations that deal with actual physical production and large supply chains already do the type of planning that’s been done in past and present socialist states. In fact it’s probably larger and more complex than some whole countries. A common example is Walmart. You’ll find little market forces within its operation. In fact companies like this, that have complex enough products and/or supply chains do everything they can to isolate themselves from the free market in order to decrease uncertainty, therefore increase the likelihood of successfully producing and delivering the product, and of course maximize their profits. If you consider how every major sector of the economy is getting consolidated through competition into a monopoly or oligopoly, and similar economic planning process goes on in most of those, you could perhaps see how capitalism itself trends towards central planning. Of course for profit maximization and not social benefit.
First of all, it is hilarious that as part of criticizing capitalism, you use economic growth as a metric instead of let’s say availability of goods in stores. Yes, if your economy revolves around state directed things like building weapons, infrastructure and growing industry, it gets easier to manage than unpredictable consumer demands.
China started it’s explosive growth when they relaxed their central control. I am not advocating some absolute libertarian market freedom either. Yes, state exerting control, ideally with consumer interests in mind, can be a good thing to avoid the pitfalls of “pure” capitalism. But there are also risks to that, see China overbuilding high speed rail and housing.
And finally, isn’t Walmart the poster example of decentralized planning? It does the “planning” at the level of store selling final goods, where there is best access to data, such as shopping habits and trends. That’s the point of decentralized planning, not having unreliable ad-hoc supply chains.
PS: To be clear, you also have many good points. I addressed only the ones I disagreed with.
Economic growth is just easy to check data. Many people are completely unaware even of that. Not saying you specifically are. If one’s interested beyond that, could look into other indicators such as education, life expectancy, etc.
China’s relaxed some sectors and not others depending on their importance and the competency within.
Generally markets and competition do well in figuring out how to do something we don’t know how to do well and cheap. Once we figure that out for some product or category, profits fall competitors fail and consolidation sets in, cost of production falls further due to decreasing duplication and increased scale. At that stage, you have to re-establish control or the monopoly begins draining resources from the economy by raising prices. I think this is what China’s doing. They do a high level plan on what they want to develop, get their centrally controlled bits needed in place, e.g. capital from banks, raw resources for batteries, then let existing or new companies enter a competitive market to develop the thing. We saw this occur with EVs. I don’t think they’ve reached the consolidation point yet.
A sector that hasn’t been relaxed for example is banking and for a good reason.
But beyond relaxing control, the other very important thing that was relaxed was foreign direct investment. Getting factories built in sectors you don’t have by foreign firms, almost always as joint ventures with the clearly stated goal of knowledge transfer. Personally I think this is likely a bigger contributor to their economic explosion than planning changes although it also requires planning changes itself.
On Walmart, I think what you’re looking at is the feedback mechanism of shop/factory data going up the stack. A Walmart store has no capability of doing the planning needed to get a requested amount of a certain good on its shelves, beyond requesting it from Walmart HQ. Walmart HQ computes and directs everything from telling how many thousand plastic trays a factory in China should make, to eventually getting the 50 requested by a store in Bumfuck Nowhere delivered. Data feedback mechanisms exist in every operation of meaningful complexity. They existed in the USSR, they exist in China, they exist in every corporation I’ve worked in, currently automotive. Every large corporation takes data from its operations, either through people or directly from processes, or both, or from their products themselves, computes projections, decides what to make more of, less of, what program to cancel or start, what input resources to get more or less of, how many people to hire or fire, all in order to support the desired new projection. Then they turn that into their expected growth numbers for the next quarter and spit it out during their investors call.
Economic growth is just easy to check data.
That’s debatable but ok.
Generally markets and competition do well in figuring out how to do something we don’t know how to do well and cheap. Once we figure that out for some product or category, profits fall competitors fail and consolidation sets in, cost of production falls further due to decreasing duplication and increased scale.
Absolutely yes.
A sector that hasn’t been relaxed for example is banking and for a good reason.
Yes, very good reason.
But beyond relaxing control, the other very important thing that was relaxed was foreign direct investment.
So the other big part of capitalism.
On Walmart, I think what you’re looking at is the feedback mechanism of shop/factory data going up the stack.
I think this comes back to what you said before. If we are talking about established items, that you already have suppliers for, then you can centralize it.
But good luck getting beer from a small local brewery stocked. The more centralized, the less flexible and innovative.
Imo if you centralize on a scale of an entire national economy, you would have very hard time dealing with anything that’s not a well established supply line already.
The thing is, you don’t have to centralize the entire economy in order to be positioned to solve for the difficult problems facing us. But I think having a robust long-term looking economic planning in the sectors everything else rests upon, like energy, natural resources, transportation, logistics, education, care, housing, banking, finance, basic research, defense, food, electronics components, chips etc. itself produces small firms that can do new things much easier due to the availability of materials, equipment, capital and labour at low costs. This doesn’t mean that for example every chip made would have to be planned by someone in the capital. Nothing of the short. It means that the planner says, we need to have the designs and ability to mass produce low cost, high performance RISC-V cores for PCB integration by 2025. Then Huawei and SMIC get their shit together and assemble teams to do this. If they need more capital they get it. If there’s someone who wants to start working on a design with a new team, there’s going to be capital available for a startup. Once the core is in production, that core becomes an input for other large and small firms, or individuals who want to do something with a low cost processor in it that now have a viable path to form new firms. This is why there are a shit ton of small Chinese firms making innovative consumer items. This is why US firms keep explaining how they can’t possibly make this or that product in the US in the context of tariffs. When everyone downstream from them is profit maximizing, their inputs become prohibitively expensive. Someone was talking about how much it would cost to source a small neodymium magnet motor for a consumer pump made in the states and said it’s so expensive that it’s only viable for defense, aerospace and such. And then the neodymium still comes from China.
The consumer parts of the economy where you have smaller firms with interesting products often sits at the tip of the existing supply chains and infrastructure. Perhaps use them differently. That’s also true for local breweries as they rarely grow their hops, wheat or build their own equipment from bare metal, or mine the metal.
But even in the consumer sector here (Canada), most of the aisles in our grocery stores are filled by the products of a handful of companies. PepsiCo, Coca-Cola, Unilever, Colgate-Palmolive, Kraft, Nestle, Kellogg’s, Danone, Mars, Mondelez and the store brand. Then you have Big Ag product filling the produce and meat section from the usual suspects. Outside of who provides these firms with direction and who collects their profits, they’re what state-owned enterprises look like.
It means that the planner says, we need to have the designs and ability to mass produce low cost, high performance RISC-V cores for PCB integration by 2025.
But this is the hard part. Who is qualified to say that RISC-V is the way to go instead of x86? An elected politician? Experts? If experts, how do you select them? Who checks they really are experts? Who holds them accountable?
If there’s someone who wants to start working on a design with a new team, there’s going to be capital available for a startup.
Who and how decides if a startup is worthy of funding? How do you prevent ideas being rejected for personal reasons, e.g. religious objection? How do you prevent fraudulent startups?
If they need more capital they get it.
Who and how decides when it is no longer worth it? How do you avoid fraud, wastefulness, etc.?
Wish I could upvote your comment more than once. Clear as it can be. 👌🏼
Capitalism can exist on a gold standard, or a barter system of goods, which if we were on those systems then a shrinking population would do nothing inherently negative.
The thing that breaks with a declining birth rate is monetary policy, which requires an ever growing money supply because we’ve designed a 2% inflation target, which means growing consumption via debt monetization. The reason for 2% inflation is to monetize our debt, in order to force people onto the risk curve for economic growth; we grow the money supply about 6% a year to achieve 2% inflation due to technological advances and a broken CPI index.
It’s not just capitalism though, it’s innovation and the arts. Our development as a species is partly contingent on population, on more chances of finding that genius, more excess capacity that can be devoted to things not obviously profitable. I disagree with the open endedness of your statement, the rate of change.
Given
- we can’t keep growing
- we’re probably beyond sustainable capacity for this planet
I’ll agree with
- we need to slow and stop population growth
- shrinking population would be better
But disagree
- the rate of drop is important - we want to reduce harm, societal stress, conflict
- we want to plateau at some population well into the billions but less than today
Most importantly, fertility trends look like we’re heading for a fairly steep drop in population as the current generations age out and pass. We are heading toward disruption, societal stress, conflict.
It’s unclear how to stabilize the birth rate for that lower plateau, since we’re mature enough to not go back to oppressing women (I hope), but clearly we’re disincenting children and will quite likely regret that in a generation or two, for most developed countries. For the long term future of humanity and our society, we need to start making tweaks now, when they’re just tweaks. Start making it easier to have children. Start helping parents more. Start making it easier to grow up. Look after our future as a species rather than freeload off the personal choices of individuals.
I do compare it with our treatment of climate change. We failed to make small changes when small changes would have been sufficient. The longer we wait, the bigger, more disruptive, more expensive the changes will need to be. We’re bad at looking ahead and setting longe term priorities but need to get better fast
We need financial and quality of life incentives to pump the gas and brakes on babies.
We need to match the death rate with the birth rate and move that disparity super slowly.
Too many geriatrics, worker class gets f’d
It usually always translates to “We really need more poor and working class labor so pump out more wage slaves.” We could be a way better society if we move past enriching billionaires and the rich.
Humans are the most overabundant resource on the planet…if capitalism actually functioned, the system wouldn’t incentivize creating more.
But the current economic system isn’t even true capitalism…it’s optimized wage enslavement paired with a caste system. Keeping labor pools well stocked depresses the value of replacing individual units…all they’re figuring out now is how best to trim maintenance costs.
Actually would be nice if worker pop drops so hard the value of workers goes up.
In Europe after the Black Plague the value of peasants increased significantly contributing to social and economic reforms. Lower birth rates can accomplish the same feat with less suffering.
The average age at death was much-much lower.
There is enough out there for everyone to live a happy life. We just have to realize it.
We know, realizing it isn’t the issue, it’s (oversimplified) the greed of the ones who stand in the way of making it happen.
Trap people in a work - consume - die paradigm
People refuse to bring new life into the hellscape you created
Cry about it in your propaganda channels
capitalism: fuck the world up and then panic when people give up on life
Capitalism is fine with it actually.
The issue is that there will be too many old people and not enough young people to support them.
But old people have most of the money. So, lots of money will still be spent. Capitalism will be fine. Sure, some old people will have no money and bankrupt their children. But capitalism does not care about that.
It would have been a bigger problem before AI and robotics. But capitalism will shrink the workforce faster than birth rates.
You can’t bankrupt your children lmaoo just toss em in the wood chipper, or hand them over to the state. They won’t be leaving much behind but you can’t bankrupt your kids just by existing
Like, they are bad for societies though. Not just in terms of keeping them around but also in terms of demographic makeup, no? Children are an important part of the social fabric. There is a point at which the old outnumbering the young does bevome a bad thing.
Why though? Those statements might or might not be true, but they’re totally unqualified.
My mind goes to this video.
Yes, but our consumer society isn’t raising the alarm for those reasons (for the most part)
It’s a crisis for who will support you in your old age. Capitalism or no capitalism, if you want to keep eating after you stop working, either you store enough literal food in your barn, or somebody else works so you eat.
Traditionally, that’s family: your children. Capital/investments/savings, or socialised care, spreads that around the State a bit more (or round the local or global community). But when there are few children and many adults, later there are few working people and many retirees wanting to enjoy life - and you’re one of the retirees.
It’s a “problem for capitalism” because so many people have invested in capitalism for their retirement, and that could be upended. And because actually-small investments were made, on the basis that constant economic growth means lots will be returned when the time comes.
But it’s a “problem for humanity” - all the people who don’t have children to care for them and rely on money and financial investments - which both just represent a stake in someone else’s work - for the future.
I’ve written myself into a corner a bit here. Few working adults to many retirees is always going to be difficult, no matter your economic/political system. But logically from my, simplified, argument, the last two paragraphs beckon a third. To recap,
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Retirement funds: a stake in “Capitalism”, to provide for your retirement based on broad economic growth
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Money: a stake in the total economy, to provide from people’s work. Then:
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A stake in the community, based on being a member of the community. E.g. a citizen - then this is socialism. If there are enough working adults - or bread in the barn - to provide for all the elderly, then all the elderly (you included) are provided for, regardless of whether they have children or saved money or made investments.
But still, if there isn’t enough for everyone, everyone suffers. And it’s rare to find a community that really wants to care for its elders well, putting in the effort for them rather than people spending on themselves, without outsourcing to ‘capitalism’ and economic growth.
Your problem is twofold.
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We need people working services, among which elderly care is going to be big, and producing all the stuff the existing people need.
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You keep working with money. Money is a great idea for a society where everyone is supposed to be productive. But not so great beyond that. When you inevitably move to a society where loads of people are not productive because of age and automation, money becomes an obstacle rather than an asset.
Given the limited amount of people needed to provide services and produce with the current and near future level of automation the only problem is money. Because money means that only people who earn it have rights to goods and services.
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Births are not a problem we aren’t “too many” we not overpopulated we are destroying resources without thinking how they get back into nature. Thia is not a thanos solution if we are half as many but still doing the same shit nothing will change.
