Degrowth

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There Are Many Threats to Humanity. A Low Birth Rate Isn’t One of Them. (www.currentaffairs.org)

submitted 2 days ago by relianceschool@slrpnk.net to c/degrowth@slrpnk.net

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Far-right authoritarian pundits and political actors, from Matt Walsh to Elon Musk, all seem to have gotten the same memo instructing them to fixate on “low” fertility and birth rates. Musk has claimed that “population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming” and that it will lead to “mass extinction.”

Some liberals are flirting with this narrative, too. In a February New Yorker essay, Gideon Lewis-Kraus deploys dystopian imagery to describe the “low” birth-rate in South Korea, twice comparing the country to the collapsing, childless society in the 2006 film Children of Men.

It’s not just liberals and authoritarians engaging in this birth-rate crisis panic. Self-described leftist Elizabeth Bruenig recently equated falling fertility with humanity’s inability “to persist on this Earth.” Running through her pronatalist Atlantic opinion piece is an entirely uninterrogated presumption that fertility rates collected today are able to predict the total disappearance of the species Homo sapiens at some future time.

But is this panic about low fertility driving human population collapse supported by any evidence?

https://archive.ph/rIycs

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[–] veganpizza69@lemmy.vg 18 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

The article is pretty good, but you need to have a bunch of context to understand what it's pointing out.

I've been noticing the Social Darwinism plans for a while. The traditional pronatalist policy is indeed that of "quantity", specifically, a high quantity of human capital with high turnover - for labor and war. The human capital, you, need to understand that this means:

women are domestic baby factories ("traditional family")
men are (wage?) slaves, worked to death with only enough time to sleep and reproduce
huge infant mortality rates (this tends to increase fertility as people try to make spare children)
huge childhood mortality rates
large maternal mortality rate (guess why the chainsaw was invented)
an abundance of orphans
lower and lower life expectancy (retirement = death)

What I still don't understand is why these pronatalist types want so much human capital when they have so much technology to replace humans, especially now. It's a weird contradiction in the TESCREAL ideologues. If anyone knows, let me know.

Here's a good podcast to get a grip on this very broad topic: the overshoot podcast.

[–] MrMakabar@slrpnk.net 1 points 42 minutes ago

They want a cheap work force to steal wealth. That can be done by having a lot of supply in other words natalism or it can be done by lowering demand using technology. They obviously go for both.

[–] Dogyote@slrpnk.net 11 points 1 day ago

This may answer your question. I've read that the only way to continue making a profit, aka be better off than the laboring masses, is to use human labor power to produce products/services. Why? Because if a process is automated, the process's rate of profit will eventually fall to zero. Why? Competition with other businesses that automate will drive the price down as low as it can go (unless of course there's collusion or a monopoly is allowed to exist).

Put another way, in order to make money, you need to be able to pay your labor less than the value of whatever they're producing. If the whole process is automated, there's no one to pay at all, which is amazing for a hot second, but once another business copies and undercuts you, you need to lower your price to match theirs. Then a third person copies and undercuts you both, and before you know it you're not making any money because everyone is selling a fraction of a cent above cost.