Politesse
Lux Aeterna
- Joined
- Feb 27, 2018
- Messages
- 12,155
- Location
- Chochenyo Territory, US
- Gender
- nonbinary
- Basic Beliefs
- Jedi Wayseeker
Yes it is a problem. Who wants to work hard if there is no level of comfort. Back in the 50s a guy working in a grocery store or a shoe store could afford a small house and family on a single income.
Where I'm getting lost is how this is related to capitalism, and not a natural malthusian cycle. In the 50s and 60s there was a post-war boom where people were highly in demand, and could make a decent wage doing work that wasn't overly skilled.
Today that isn't the case because there is an overwhelming amount of people on the planet willing to do unskilled work. It's not something inherent to capitalism, it's basic supply and demand. As soon as our population declines to a level where people are in demand again, wages will go up.
Now I know I'm starting to sound like a conservative, but I really do care about people's well-being. I just don't know that the answer to improve people's well-being is necessarily to give them more money. Because if suddenly an entire population has a completely comfortable wage, they produce more babies, and the supply / demand problem gets worse - we have even more people and fewer jobs and we enter an infinite loop where somehow we need to keep supplying the well-being of more and more people.
Now maybe there is room for some improvement, but at some point we have to face the fact that there are real environmental limitations to our quality of life, and keep at least some of the responsibility on full grown adults to make good decisions about their offspring.
Malthusian cycles are Victorian pseudo-science with no empirical basis. Do you honestly believe that wealth results directly in fecundity? Have you ever looked at a population density map and figured out where the most dense concentrations of people are? Not only does starving people to death to reduce population not work, it immediately backfires.