Remember kids, “the economy” is double-speak for “record breaking profits for the rich”.
Personally, I always substitute it with “rich people’s yacht money”
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.
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.
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.
Infinite growth requires infinite bodies to feed it.
Unfortunately I don’t have infinite fucks to give
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
Always were
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.
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I got an hour long seminar at 12, wagie!
We will fix u
“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!
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
That means the supply of workers in many countries is quickly diminishing.
I thought AI was going to take our jobs.
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.
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.
Oh no. Not the economy.
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 first, they claim ownership over all women, then rent them out to men.
I want to say that’s just cynical sarcasm, but I’m not certain.
[Handmaid’s Tale intensifies]
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.
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?
What is normal?
Fortunately population numbers are returning to sane levels, and doing so without bloodshed, famine or diseases. What a fortune.
The labor market is a market. It is regulated by supply and demand. The good being traded for money is human labor.
If supply goes down (fewer workers being born), prices go up; that means, higher wages.
If supply goes up (more workers being born), prices go down; that means, lower wages.
Is this fair?
Is this sane?
