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It is disturbing that people take for granted that this is an economic problem. This thread is full of people lamenting the fact that we could support X times a

• pstuart 6y ago
  We are on the cusp of the next step of humanity (if we don't kill ourselves first). I think this story lays out how that could look: https://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm https://marshallbrain.com/manna1.htm
  • iso1631 6y ago
    A choice of two dystopias, yeay
    • pstuart 6y ago
      Did you read the story all the way through? If we're going to live in a world dominated by AI/Automation it presents a compelling alternative to the current path.
• echelon 6y ago
  > The techno utopian solution of allocating everyone a 20 m^2 apartment, a vr headset, and 1500 calories of soylent per day is going to be a disaster unless you also allocate everyone some future drugs to keep them sedated. I don't know if you live in California, but I think that there's sort of a reality distortion field that comes with living in a big and expensive city. Here in Georgia the rents are cheap and people seem to be moderately satisfied. A little money goes a long way. You can own acres of land dirt cheap and do with it whatever you want.
  • kasrkin623 6y ago
    Who wants to live in Georgia though? I mean this unironically, there's not much to do in terms of entertainment and opportunities for a young 20 yo vs LA or NY
    • jojobas 6y ago
      Perhaps some 80% of global population would be very grateful to relocate to Georgia.
      • capableweb 6y ago
        I know Americans on the internet usually view their country with rose-shaded glasses but this comment has to take the price. I don't know the number, don't think anyone does, but off the people I know, 100% would never want to move to any state in the US. Probably the real number of people wanting to immigrate to the US is closer to 0% than 100%.
        • harperlee 6y ago
          It doesn't really make sense to try to pinpoint an exact number, but I think you are right in answering to another subtly different question: the real people that would move, given just the opportunity, and nothing more. E.g. my grandmother would not move, most non-white people would face racial difficulties there that might not be present in their home country and would not consider moving, a lawyer might not be able to maintain a bar status there, etc. But if you read your parent post caritatively, and the context to which it is responding, they are discussing just location - so the implicit question is more of "would a random world citizen complain about moving to Georgia, in the conditions that a US citizen would move (belonging to society, job prospects, no issues with recognition of citizenship, education, job experience, no language issues, etc. etc.)". He is just answering to the dismissal of the Georgia standard of living. So yeah, answering to that second question, and speaking as a western european, I do think that most (more than 50%) of my acquaintances would take the chance (I think this because most barriers would be being far from friends and family and language issues, but following the spirit of the initial complaint, we are talking about an american who already lives probably far away from friends and family, in LA or NY). Obviously this is also just opinion and I did not run a poll, but I thought the rose-shaded glasses thing was a red herring.
• fiblye 6y ago
  > The demand for labor will go up, the supply will go down. Bad for the investor class looking for profits, good for reducing economic inequality. People will be able to profit from labor again. I'm not so sure about that. Loads of wealth is consolidated at the top, both in terms of economic class and age. People who got their jobs and attained management positions after barely graduating high school are demanding bachelor's or master's degrees for jobs that will barely pay rent. Landowners bought up when it was cheap and refuse to lower prices or sell for below what they think it's worth, even going as far as evicting people during a pandemic, knowing full well those units might not be filled in months or years, if ever. Some young people will get to a point where they can buy stuff up and work their way up the ladder, but there will be plenty more people who have it all given to them by those who established themselves when it was easier. I don't expect the next generation to be any more compassionate. There are already endless reports of there being insufficient workers for agricultural jobs, nursing, teachers, etc. Wages haven't risen to meet the demand. They've remained stagnant or dropped in the long term. Meanwhile, those at the top are richer than ever. Wealth at the top is often created by rent seeking. Just extracting money without actually making anything. I'm pretty confident that if the number of workers dropped and demand for labor increased, they'd just squeeze harder. Shut out the ones who didn't make it and terrify the ones who've managed to hold a job about the possibilities of what'll happen should they quit. People are already getting paid more being unemployed. Employers are trying to get people to work for them again while offering them less than unemployment pays. They're not even trying to compete because they know people are going to come desperately crawling back.
  • creato 6y ago
    You are thinking very short term and in a very narrow range of conditions around our current economic situation. We have never seen economic conditions remotely close to what we would see if the population were actually shrinking.
    • sudosysgen 6y ago
      We have a good enough understanding of capitalism to know that the average person will not benefit from a shrinking labour pool. You have no clue just how devastating a shrinking population would be to an economy where the real average wage hasn't increased in 40 year.
• gxon 6y ago
  To add to that, even if we can technically support a lot more people with the sustainable resources we have, which I personally doubt, getting close to our max capacity means we will have zero wiggle room when things go wrong. With climate change accelerating and guaranteed to cause drastic changes to our environment, a lot of things will go wrong at the same time. The analogy I like is your income/spending ratio. Yes, you can technically spend 100% of your income, or even >100% with debt. But if you choose to live like that, then when you get laid off, or get sick/disabled, or divorced, or forced to start caring for a relative, or have your house burn down, then all of a sudden what's already a major emergency is exacerbated by financial issues. Decreasing our population now is like increasing our savings rate. We know difficult times are coming. Fewer people will only help us navigate the transition more humanely and equitably. Not only is this true from a macro/global scale, but also a micro/family scale where it's obvious that having more kids than you can afford or have time to raise is its own kind of cruelty. Anyway, if you're choosing to have kids, one is enough. The real winners adopt.
  • aluth 6y ago
    > Anyway, if you're choosing to have kids, one is enough. The real winners adopt. Not from an evolutionary standpoint, lol
    • gxon 6y ago
      Meh. The continuation of the species is more important than some silly desire to mix my own DNA into a new human. A kind of corollary to the Gay Uncle theory. I also consider the memes > genes in terms of leaving a legacy. Shaping a kid's mindset doesn't require them to share half of your genes.
      • aluth 6y ago
        I can appreciate the idea that one's work can (potentially) function as a superior alternative to children, with respect to legacy. In general, I'm all for elevating the rational part of Human mind. On the other hand, I think it's dangerous to describe the reproductive priorities of the "primitive" mind as a "silly desire". To put it more concretely, imagine a husband who has just learned that the children he's dedicated years of financial, emotional, and educational support are not his own. Imagine the gamut of emotions that cross his mind: anger/hatred toward his wife's deception; the humiliation that comes from being deceived; the conflict that comes from both loving the children, yet despising them for what they represent. How do you think that man would respond if you told him that his feelings were the consequence of a "silly desire". It's all well and good to have a world with gay uncles that support their nephews and nieces; but somebody's gotta make those nephews and nieces.
• blueblisters 6y ago
  > A shrinking, aging population would fix this problem. The demand for labor will go up, the supply will go down. An ageing population likely consumes less. The demand for goods will go down and the demand for labor will likely remain constant for a shrinking workforce. Asset prices will crash if future demand does not keep up with current valuations. This is not just bad for the investor class, this is bad for anyone who relies on the modern banking and financial systems.
• mxcrossb 6y ago
  Lack of economic opportunity is largely a man made problem due to poor social institutions. Unfortunately a reduced population size won’t fix that.
• sudosysgen 6y ago
  A reducing labor population really won't help the working class. First of all, you'll be able to kiss your retirement bye bye. Second of all, you would likely see decline of the economy in real terms. This will cause huge dysfunctions in capitalism, as there will not be an efficient way to invest.
  • jackcosgrove 6y ago
    If your retirement was predicated on a forever swelling population lifting your boat, then you actually didn't save enough to retire. Secure retirements shouldn't rely on paygo systems and infinite growth.
    • scarmig 6y ago
      The issue is that large numbers of people, organizations, and governments have assumed a forever swelling population in their retirement plans. So, yes, like any time in history there will be individuals who haven't saved enough to retire. The issue is that a demographic contraction throws the large majority of retirees into crippling poverty, absent government intervention that allocates capital investment and workers' consumption toward retirees' consumption. Obviously a forever swelling population is not model we can or should try to sustain, but reaching some kind of replacement-level equilibrium is sustainable and is much healthier for workers' and retirees' economic health.
      • iso1631 6y ago
        Majority of working people live paycheck to paycheck, earning enough to pay for rent, food, and maybe a few beers on a friday night. Any extra money from pay rises goes into spiraling rent costs cause by extra money from pay rises, which goes to those who own the rentable assets. There is more than enough housing to go round. There is more than enough food to go round. There's more than enough beer to go round. Yet there are people working 100 hours a week sweeping floors that can barely pay for it. There have to be better ways to distribute what's being generated (which is almost entirely from those ages 20-65) among the population without disenfranchising increasing numbers of those that actually do the work
• mlyle 6y ago
  > A shrinking, aging population would fix this problem. The demand for labor will go up, the supply will go down. Bad for the investor class looking for profits, good for reducing economic inequality. People will be able to profit from labor again. An economy exists to fulfill human needs of various kinds-- making stuff, providing services, etc. Old people intensively consume (medical services, etc) and don't produce anymore. Getting too high of a ratio of old people therefore has some impacts beyond equilibrium labor prices.
• bananaface 6y ago
  The problem with the economic line of thinking is: Why do peasants in Africa have more children than Lawyers in New York? Builders in Arkensas have more kids than tech workers in San Francisco? Poor people in general have more kids than rich people. It doesn't fit the data.
  • killjoywashere 6y ago
    "it's in the very poorest places that you're going to have a tripling in population ... it's amazingly as children survive, parents feel like they'll have enough kids to support them in their old age. And so they choose to have less children." https://www.gatesnotes.com/about-bill-gates/a-conversation-with-bill-gates-population-growth https://www.gatesnotes.com/about-bill-gates/a-conversation-w...
    • bananaface 6y ago
      I actually don't agree with that diagnosis. I think the very poorest people genuinely can't access contraception. Once you get above a fairly low level and the pill becomes affordable, something else becomes the bigger factor. I just don't buy that very poor people ration out sex under a precise calculation of how many kids they want. Doesn't fit my observations of how humans behave. Most people fuck because they're horny, or because their husband is horny and they need his support to survive, or frankly because they're so poor they have to sell themselves. HIV is a bigger risk than not having children in old age, most Africans know that, but that doesn't stop it either.
      • lazyjones 6y ago
        > Once you get above a fairly low level and the pill becomes affordable, something else becomes the bigger factor. The life choices of women are an important factor. Having both a career and children is still difficult today and more women choose careers.
  • ClumsyPilot 6y ago
    You can't just draw a parallel between a poor agricultural worker and a New York Lawyer, because obviously there are a thousand confounding factors, anything from education to where is the nearestvdoctor, so general stavility of the country.
• red_admiral 6y ago
  This is the point I was about to make, but you've put it better than me. As the traditional factory job disappears more and more, the aging population will provide a huge source of new caring/support jobs. We'll have to find a way to pay them a living wage, but then we had that problem with factory jobs in the early industrial revolution too.
  • mjburgess 6y ago
    The problem is care-jobs are incredibly low productivity. The reason a worker today is paid more than 100 years ago is, essentially, just that they can produce/transact with more people at once. A nurse "should" be paid what they were 100 years ago, as the number of transactions hasn't changed. The only reason they aren't is due to competition from productive sectors. But those productive sectors need to exist! In a world where many people are doing such low-productivity jobs, everyone will be much poorer.
    • tsimionescu 6y ago
      How can you compare productivity across functions, nevermore industries? Does a nurse produce less than a director of marketing? By what possible metric? Profit comes to mind, but I am hoping no one is inhuman enough to judge the medical care sector by its profits...
      • mjburgess 6y ago
        Profit is a measure of productivity, other things being equal. A director of marketing creates a campaign which affects millions of transactions... so it's a function which can dramatically increase economic production. It's pretty easy to compare productivity across industries. Leave what "should" be aside, when you're planning for the success of nations you cannot rely on Moral Bonuses. The rate of economic activity (ie., people transacting with one another such that each has more than before) is measurable: it's called growth. And you cannot grow by replacing highly productive industries with deeply unproductive ones. To pay for things we need the ratio of workers:transactions to increase. Human history was severely impoverished because this was always a low number. We are wealthy today only because it is a higher one.
• Cthulhu_ 6y ago
  I do believe it is an economic problem, in that people are not secure in their job, housing, and life enough to bring new people into it. Think Maslow's wotsit of needs. And I think back on where I grew up, what my parents did; they got married early 20's, and were financially secure enough in blue-collar jobs to afford a house twice the size of the one I managed to finally buy at age 32. With that house and the luxury of being able to make ends meet on a single income, they were able to raise three kids. Meanwhile nowadays a lot of people have to work their ass off just to keep afloat. You can't have a healthy relationship if you don't have the time or energy for it, you can't raise kids in a shitty shared apartment, you shouldn't have kids if you can't take care of them because you have to work.
  • dorchadas 6y ago
    This is the main reason I never want kids. I'm just not sure I'll ever be secure enough while young enough to really care for them. Student loans being the main killer; if I could get rid of them and buy a house, things might be different. But, more than that, I'm also not sure if I'll ever be secure enough to make sure they're secure in the future that seems inevitably coming, with regards to global warming, etc. I just feel it isn't responsible currently.
    • lotsofpulp 6y ago
      I also had/have reservations for the same reason before having children. If I didn’t pair up with another high earner, I would not have tried to have children, as I believe the labor market is too volatile. I also would have wanted to spare them the effects of climate change/societal turbulence, but partner wanted kids so I said sure, but I wonder if that was the right call sometimes.
    • pantaloony 6y ago
      Having kids took us from “will retire comfortably, probably early, without seriously having to sacrifice for it” to “uh, might retire only a little late, somewhat comfortably, with great effort and luck?” We’re also at much greater risk, financially. On both counts healthcare costs/risks are a big part of why (lost wages and direct costs for childcare are are #1 on the cost side, though). Friggin’ American healthcare system.
• lazyjones 6y ago
  We're going to be a multi-planetary species. All we need is people willing to take risks instead of peons trying to live a cosy, uneventful and "sustainable" life in their government-allocated single-room apartments. And having children really isn't a huge risk even for the most incompetent.
  • ClumsyPilot 6y ago
    I mean in the middle ages if you had 12 children and a third survived, you've done well.
• greggman3 6y ago
  I see this idea here in several places. Effectively "more money = more kids" There is ZERO evidence that's the case. In fact all evidence points to the opposite. The more money people have the less likely they are to have children. I'm not suggesting that we should therefore lower people's incomes. Only suggesting that the idea that his has anything do with lacking economic opportunity has zero basis in fact. The richer a country gets, the less kids they have, period. --- follow up: According to this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_and_fertility birth rates do rise at some level of income but not enough to cover deaths. Here's some other charts to look at https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate https://ourworldindata.org/fertility-rate --- To put in another way, let's wonder if we lived in a post scarcity society and everyone had all they needed and more. Would the birth rate explode? Would it go up a bunch? Would it hit the replacement level? I suppose it's all speculation but my reading of the data it is would not hit the replacement level. Basically, for whatever reason, people that are well educated and well off want children less than those that don't for whatever reason.
  • ashtonkem 6y ago
    The “more money == more kids” hypothesis comes from the observation that women are typically having fewer kids than they reportedly want to have, implying that something is holding them back from having the number of kids they want. In places like America, the cost of childcare is commonly pointed to. However this phenomenon is common enough across multiple countries with different labor arrangements that I genuinely doubt its just the cost.
  • conanbatt 6y ago
    Adam Smith mentions explicitly in 1776 how "women of stature tire after having 2 or 3 children, if any at all. Poor women have up to 20" (couldn't find the literal quote).
• kharak 6y ago
  I think we've come to opposite conclusions. Fewer children increases unequality. Less children means, that inheritance does not spread across several people. To the contrary, it consolidates within an ever shrinking size of the population. And because as of today it's capital ownership and not work that makes you rich (with few exceptions), higher demand for work might not be enough to offset this development.
• swiley 6y ago
  I live in a small studio apartment in a city, don’t do drugs, and don’t have a VR headset. I’m very happy even when working from home, the two things that bother me the most are fear of losing my job and fear of losing my girlfriend. Maybe some people aren’t happy without having a yard? There are plenty of plants around here though and there’s an entire block that’s left as just trees and grass for people to walk around in. Maybe without that I’d feel the same way.
• bart_spoon 6y ago
  > A shrinking, aging population would fix this problem. The demand for labor will go up, the supply will go down. Bad for the investor class looking for profits, good for reducing economic inequality. People will be able to profit from labor again. Except in terms of pure economics, labor won’t necessarily become more valuable, because with less population there will be less consumption and less demand for goods. So even though the dwindling supply of labor will have an upward effect on labor’s value, the dwindling demand for goods will have a counteracting downward effect. And this will only be exacerbated by increased automation. Economic inequality and lack of economic opportunity is going to be a problem regardless of the population growth rate, and the solution will require something more substantial than simply have less/more children.
  • regularfry 6y ago
    The point about it being an aging population is that the proportion of consumers to producers will change. The demand for goods might shrink as an absolute value, but the demand for labour should increase more, as a higher proportion of the population just can't work. In addition, part of the demand which increases will be for forms of labour that we currently don't have an automation plan for. To balance out the automation question, it's just as likely that technical advances will improve the ability of older people to do economically useful work that they want to do. There's a lot of mental horsepower, life experience, and will there, if you can work around physical and metabolic limitations.
• neverminder 6y ago
  > A shrinking, aging population would fix this problem. The demand for labor will go up, the supply will go down. Bad for the investor class looking for profits, good for reducing economic inequality. People will be able to profit from labor again. There is historical evidence of this, like consequences of the Black Death: "Another notable consequence of the Black Death was the raising of the real wage of England (due to the shortage of labour as a result of the reduction in population), a trait shared across Western Europe, which in general led to a real wage in 1450 that was unmatched in most countries until the 19th or 20th century. The higher wages for workers combined with sinking prices on grain products led to a problematic economic situation for the gentry." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Death_in_England https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Death_in_England
• OGWhales 6y ago
  > A shrinking, aging population would fix this problem. The demand for labor will go up, the supply will go down. Bad for the investor class looking for profits, good for reducing economic inequality. People will be able to profit from labor again. Growing populations can also reduce wealth inequality and lessen the importance of inherited wealth. These are complicated issues, to be sure.
• mmm_grayons 6y ago
  > A shrinking, aging population would fix this problem. The demand for labor will go up, the supply will go down. What leads you to believe demand for labor will rise with a shrinking population? Furthermore, why wouldn't most companies simply continue automating? While Japan certainly isn't comparable to most western nations, it's certainly a good example of the potential downsides of a shrinking, aging population. A growing one isn't possible forever, either; it will eventually level out. We've just been innovating so quickly our population hasn't had time to reach a new equilibrium.
• helen___keller 6y ago
  > Huge swathes of people are desperate, angry, and depressed, I think because there is no opportunity for them. As a slight digression, mental health is particularly dire because culturally we have not learned how to advance it yet. Mental health is not given the same reverence as physical health. It's common sense more or less that you need to drink water, eat healthy food, get good sleep, get exercise. Some people don't do it, but it's well known that you should. What do you do for mental health? Take some time off occasionally? There is simply not an equivalent body of knowledge as what is needed for physical healthiness. If the industrial revolution made food abundant and jobs sedentary such that obesity is a problem, the information revolution made similar problems for mental health- but we don't spread awareness because being depressed or anxious isn't as visible as being obese.
  • dumbfoundded 6y ago
    IMO, as someone who has struggled with mental health problems throughout my life, the needs of good mental health are pretty easy to understand but extremely difficult to achieve. Good mental health comes from feeling loved and needed and having a purpose in life. Love can come from one person or a community but it's absolutely essential. Having a purpose and feeling needed are as important as having the time and energy to feel like you're living up to these obligations. I feel like the idea of communities has all but been broken down. Similarly with purpose. Simply working to achieve more comfort doesn't seem to be a fulfilling purpose. Most people work just to get by without any sense of what they're doing is important. People are generally made to feel replaceable and powerless. I have no idea how to solve these problems as I feel like they are fundamental problems of our society. How can you feel necessary when you compare yourself to billions of others instead of 100s? How do you feel connected to other people when you don't even know your neighbors? I can tell you what I try to do for myself. First, I make sure I'm being healthy. I get enough sleep, exercise regularly, and cook a large portion of my meals. I try to prioritize my relationships with other people over work. Within my work, I left software to start a company that made me feel more connected with the people benefiting from my work. I still struggle with mental health a lot but when I look at where my life was 10 years ago to now, I feel a much deeper sense of fulfillment.
• Rua4yGUZ4lT1Bbv 6y ago
  People had more children when there was less economic opportunity.
  • lotsofpulp 6y ago
    Birth rates in an era with birth control and women’s ability to have careers is not comparable to birth rates without birth control and when women could not work.
• ashtonkem 6y ago
  A shrinking, aging population would in no way make this better. It would make it worse. Aging societies spend more on healthcare, have a smaller working base, and typically don’t have the kind of growth that makes it easy to borrow money to invest in new things. The typical result is slow economic growth, high taxes, and low levels of services for workers.
• ip26 6y ago
  I'm not yet convinced the uneven distribution of economic opportunity is due to a fundamental shortage of opportunity. It reminds me of the food shortages in African states embroiled in conflict- there is enough food, but it is not distributed. A significant question of our time is how we might bring economic opportunity to distressed regions. The idea of remote work from rural areas is a simple conceptual example; increasing access to markets for isolated farmers is another.
• conanbatt 6y ago
  Pretty sad how this lie has propagated and caused so much misery and frankly mental disorders. Theres no better time to be born than today, period. All the rest are ravings of a madman.
• deeg 6y ago
  I'm largely with you. I'm a bit annoyed with the BBC on this article. It seems like just last week overpopulation was a big problem. Now we are "ill-prepared for the global crash" and there will be a "jaw-dropping impact". Oy. No wonder people feel anxious.
• quicklime 6y ago
  Why would demand for labor go up in a society with a shrinking population? Both the labor market and the consumer market draw from the general population - so I would think that a shrinking population would cause both to decrease. The net per capita effect would be for things to stay the same.
  • fomine3 6y ago
    fixed amount of work is required for some task in society and some work don't need to work for increasing demand (like make a drama).
• chr1 6y ago
  There is a lot of empty space on earth even before we start terraforming deserts or building floating cities, or colonizing other planets. So the malthusian fearmongering that we are all going to die due to lack of resources is simply false. Having X times more people doesn't lead to us sacrificing anything but to producing 2^X more art and sciense. Even for such a simple example as youtube videos, if population is reduced by half, majority of people who make living by producing videos will lose half of heir income, and will stop producing videos. Developing new cpus will become much harder because research cost would stay the same, and demand would be cut in half. Moreover drastic reduction of population in the parts of world that produce most of our science would put under question even the ability to maintain the technologies we have now.
  • LargesseBargess 6y ago
    Plenty of space, yes, but in zones where you don't have to worry about natural disaster seasons, or ridiculous supply chain issues (I'm thinking southwest US for water)? NE is no cakewalk in the winter but we generally don't have to worry about a hurricane decimating a whole city. As far as production, remember the automation issue as well as the fact that, well, more content is great perhaps in smaller communities, but think of the absolute firehose the Internet is and how many creatives would want to be able to sustain off of a consistent fanbase at at least an average salary. If more (or everyone) becomes a Youtuber, does that itself reduce who is watching the vids, reduces payouts because of the sheer amount of content, and lead to a scarcity? AND MORE IMPORTANTLY: Is too much of the same type of thing being created (e.g., people used to one Nicki Minaj probably think it's great to have Saweetie and Meg Thee Stallion, but what if they get their own copycats/spinoff artists? Too much of the same thing at once?) I'm assuming economically both our scenarios would adjust to views in an increase/decrease in population. Also throwing more people at the science situation doesn't necessarily help if we aren't training quality people in the field and resort to degree factories. Think about the sheer number of papers being published nowadays. I assume it is hard for them to keep up and who knows how much more bad science (or disinformation in general) would occur then. Please put my Malthusian fears to rest!
    • LargesseBargess 6y ago
• ardy42 6y ago
  > When I look around the world today, I think the biggest resource that is lacking is economic opportunity. Huge swathes of people are desperate, angry, and depressed, I think because there is no opportunity for them. The best case scenario for huge numbers of people is stagnation. > A shrinking, aging population would fix this problem. The demand for labor will go up, the supply will go down. Bad for the investor class looking for profits, good for reducing economic inequality. People will be able to profit from labor again. To a large extent, that lack of economic opportunity is a political choice that was made by the selection of particular parameters for the economic system. Trying to engineer a shrinking population to force different parameters to be chosen is an indirect way of addressing the true problem.
• sdinsn 6y ago
  > A shrinking, aging population would fix this problem. The demand for labor will go up, the supply will go down. In the short term, absolutely. But after a generation, the old working population has retired and the smaller new working population cannot support them.
• cphuntington97 6y ago
  [‘Ghost Houses’ Haunt a Rapidly Aging Japan](https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/japanese-ghost-houses https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/japanese-ghost-houses)
• wahern 6y ago
  > allocate everyone some future drugs to keep them sedated Facebook, Netflix, and Xbox don't count? (Or HN, for that matter ;)
• saargrin 6y ago
  i think what will actually happen is that rich countries are gonna move ahead with robotics, additive manufacturing and nano and countries that cant keep up will be left behind with starving useless populations bonus points: theres gonna be severe fresh water shortage
• anthony_barker 6y ago
  If you look at The Black Death - great for young workers. Shit for land owning royalty. Same stuff