How is this a fertility issue? Are people unable to have children, or just unwilling?
It’s not a fertility issue, it’s a fecundity issue. But we tend to use the 2 terms interchangeably.
It’s the other way around. Fecundity is the measure of how well a person is biologically able to reproduce. Fertility is how many children people actually have, which also depends on voluntary choices.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/9781118896877.wbiehs153
Sperm motility issue rates are rising worldwide and I found out I was one of them this year. Mid 30s, waited to start a family while we went further in our careers. Now that we’re ready, we got hit with this, fuck me for being responsible I guess.
But you ARE being responsible. The responsible thing to do is not have kids.
why would this be the case?
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.
often so they can instead focus on a career.
Corpo speak people are broke… I expect better here
Vast majority of people don’t have “careers”
Whatever that clown term even means.
We work for money lol
That’s more than a bit insulting to the women of the world choosing to work instead of have kids. Sure, some of them are forced to because they wouldn’t have enough money to live without a job. And many of the jobs these women have chosen aren’t necessarily long term careers.
But it’s condescending and insulting to say those women have no other contributions to the world outside of working a menial day job and would rather stay at home having kids if only they could afford it. Calling a career a clown term is so edgy and cool of you! As if there aren’t people out there who absolutely love what they do for a living and aren’t happily working for crap pay just to do what they love. All of the adult women I know who have chosen not to have kids have really good careers, and all but one have a great salary.
And to your point that the vast majority of people don’t have “careers,” sometimes an entry level position that is just a day job and not really a career can lead to a bigger career. My mom started as a secretary at a small company and showed she knew how to do the job of her boss, so she got his job when he left. Then she ended up starting her own business in that field, which absolutely flourished and became the thing she did for the next 30 years.
“Corpo speak…” you are such a tool.
I personally felt like it was a reference to the complete lack of corporate loyalty to it’s employees.
It’s hard to have a “career” in the classical sense the way my 90 year old grandparents did.
You can still choose a field of work and if you’re lucky you’ll get to stay in it for most of your adult life, but between outsourcing in IT, fields being made redundant as technology advances/changes (from cashiers and retail to journalism and marketing, accounting, and phone work) and whole fields of manufacturing work getting shipped overseas, the number of lifelong fields of work available is rapidly shrinking, facing fierce competition for jobs, and becoming a moving playing field faster than most people can retrain for.
“HR” jobs could get halved or more with chatbots providing benefits and payroll adjustment information. “Big data” is doing most of the “market research” that advertisers handled manually 30 years ago.
Big money is still trying to sell us the “career” dream because it leads to the school loan debt they feed off of and temporarily gluts fields with workers to reduce salaries, but only a few handfuls of fields of work really have “career” style options anymore.
I took it not as an insult to the people trying to have one, but as disdain and disgust at how the word gets bandied about like so much bait on a hook when the reality is fastly becoming far different for the 20- and 30- somethings of today.
That might be just me being both charitable and jaded, though.
Nice anecdote but way to miss the point champ jfc
Sounds awesome. Bring it on. Less people is better fuck the infinite growth economy
The problems listed in the article are real. we’ve built a system:
- Where a lot of economic growth stems from an increasing supply of (cheap) labour
- That relies on people of working age being able to financially support a retiree class.
Both of these are going to fall apart if the population stops growing. The smaller group of working age people won’t be enough to support the amount of retirees, and without population growth there’s no economic growth.
It’s sad that economists correctly see all this coming but then conclude that the only solution is “make more babies.” It’s short term thinking almost by definition, because in the limit it’s rather obvious that at some point we will not have the resources to support any more people. And the closer we get to that limit the less each individual person will have (even worse when wealth is not equally distributed).
Unfortunately I don’t see any economist putting forth a plan that accepts population decline and alters the system to account for it. It wouldn’t be easy but it seems no one is even trying.
How is it not easy? 90% of all jobs are automated or are going to be automated away in the next few years. I only see one social class that holds us back from de facto post-scarcity. We just need to get rid of it.
I commend your optimism, but personally I’m not sure automation is actually going to carry us through this in the time frames that we need. This population problem is going to hit really hard in the next twenty to thirty years. I don’t think we’re going to fully automate the world economy in that time.
2 thoughts:
- the level of automation we have right now is enough to produce most of the stuff we need with very little assistance, as most of the useful stuff has been automated 30-40 years ago; while i agree that we are missing some important things, i think the real problem is the cleptocracy at the top
- the stuff that is being automated now is really a problem more than a solution, and is going to stop progress by putting out of work software developers and other creative professions. I’m not saying it’s going to replace them all, but if it replaces enough job positions, it’s going to make the profession a risky choice for new students and that’s going to slow down the engine a lot
"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.
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.
What country would you point to as a success for this policy?
Can i have your list of valid countries to choose from so that my answer doesn’t get disqualified for picking a third world country.
a maximum retail price exists for most if not all goods in India. And it helps slow down inflation.
India would be perfectly valid if it wasn’t experiencing high inflation just like everyone else. Which it is.
https://finimize.com/content/rbi-chief-urges-india-to-cut-inflation-despite-strong-growth
You can’t fix inflation just by setting a max price. It leads to shortages or (more common in India’s case) retailers finding loopholes:
Didn’t say it solves inflation. You cant stop a global phenomenon happening. You can ease it.
I’d like to put Simona’s mind at ease because economics research into the relationship between wages and productivity shows a casual link where higher wages increase productivity. That is, higher wages force firms to invest in technology, equipment and training in order to offset the increased labor cost.
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.
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’ve tried to convince people that if we can have a No Nut November, we ought to be able to put together a No-Sales September or something. These mentally defective executives would absolutely go back to taking care of the customer if this were a practice.
We should definitely do November for it - holiday shopping and Black Friday specifically.
Hell, if we could just boycott Black Friday and the week before and after, which is the biggest retail spend of the year, we’d probably make a serious dent. They aren’t even good deals, but good luck convincing anyone to skip it who doesn’t already.
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.
Viruses, Pyramid Schemes and Capitalism, oh my!
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.
I got an hour long seminar at 12, wagie!
We will fix u
That means the supply of workers in many countries is quickly diminishing.
I thought AI was going to take our jobs.
Right? They must not think AI and automation can replace very many human laborers, otherwise they wouldn’t consider declining birth rates to be such a crisis.
Of course it is! We are simultaneously facing a labor shortage and mass unemployment. The important thing is to keep being angry and frightened, the specific subject you’re angry about at any given time is flexible.
You can have both a labor shortage and mass unemployment. It occurs when workers are skilled for an industry with decreasing or no demand while another industry that requires different skills has increasing demand.
A good example of this is the high demand in the US for so called “Blue Collar” jobs. We have a shortage of trades people (Electricians, Plumbers, HVAC, etc) and far too many Business and Marketing people. There’s 100,000 MBA’s out there looking for a job and there’s 100,000 Plumbing Contractors trying to hire someone.
Fortunately population numbers are returning to sane levels, and doing so without bloodshed, famine or diseases. What a fortune.
Oh no. Not the economy.
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.
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.
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.
You say that, but when I’m more productive I’m inevitably much less happy. Work sucks.
Capitalist economy . Needs a lot of humans to keep its shit up. I guess a big change will come . The only help that can keep the moterfuckers doing their business is AI. It came to save them. Let’s see what happens. We humans are constantly adapting and correcting ourselves so many years already.
Less people means less stress on the environment though.
And more houses, and more job opportunities.
We’ll be…the new people will be fine!
Except the population (at least in my country) is quickly growing anyway because so many refugees come. And there will be far more if climate change continues at this speed.
3 people in a 737 don’t make 100people non matter what side they seat at or how many times they change seats…but if they seat at the right place near an emergency exit with no seatbelt on, they could make it 2 people or even 1 person in the plane!
In the long term perhaps. But it will probably take too long.
Many Boomers voted their progeny away when they put Reagan in office.
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
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
$1500 a month? I wish!
How is your rent so cheap?
