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We Need More Kids

We need, as a species, to give up the idea of endless economic growth. The Earth cannot support it. We could, OTOH, also make an effort to maker life as pleasant as possible for the existing population.
 
I spend years fending off the pseudoscience of the idiotic Malthusians, and now the same goddamned set of technically brilliant morons is turning all quiverfull. Holy over-correction, Batman!
 
Yeah, population isn't particularly important. If it falls, so what?

And economic growth isn't coupled to population growth. If it was, Africa would be the world's richest continent.

Economic growth on absolute terms is pretty meaningless. GDP per capita is more important, and a falling population makes it easy to grow per capita GDP.
 
bilby said:
Yeah, population isn't particularly important. If it falls, so what?

And economic growth isn't coupled to population growth. If it was, Africa would be the world's richest continent.

Economic growth on absolute terms is pretty meaningless. GDP per capita is more important, and a falling population makes it easy to grow per capita GDP.
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True. What DOES benefit from rising population is rising asset prices. Real estate becomes more valuable as population becomes more dense. Corporate profits increase (and thus stock prices rise) as more customers are born who will "need" iPhones, medicines, and potato chips.

And more and more workers will be needed to pay taxes to redeem the debts Republicans incurred with their tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires.

Middle-class Americans are made complicit in the billionaires' enthusiasm for population growth by believing their future depends on 9% annual growth in their 401k's.
 
The collapse of western civilization will be blamed on childless cat ladies.
 
Are they worried about a shrinking workforce? Shouldn't they be concerned about AI in the workplace? Isn't this going to hit us on a much shorter timeline? The top AI nerds say we will start to see this in as little as three years.
 
Swammerdami said:
bilby said:
Yeah, population isn't particularly important. If it falls, so what?

And economic growth isn't coupled to population growth. If it was, Africa would be the world's richest continent.

Economic growth on absolute terms is pretty meaningless. GDP per capita is more important, and a falling population makes it easy to grow per capita GDP.
Click to expand...

True. What DOES benefit from rising population is rising asset prices. Real estate becomes more valuable as population becomes more dense. Corporate profits increase (and thus stock prices rise) as more customers are born who will "need" iPhones, medicines, and potato chips.

And more and more workers will be needed to pay taxes to redeem the debts Republicans incurred with their tax cuts for millionaires and billionaires.

Middle-class Americans are made complicit in the billionaires' enthusiasm for population growth by believing their future depends on 9% annual growth in their 401k's.
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You can still get 9% return on investment with flat or declining revenues through a fat dividend. Take Altria, as an example. Their revenues have been declining every year (as smoking continues to become less popular) and yet the investment returns, when including the dividend, are still high.

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MO is one of the stocks my stock-picking mentor recommended strongly; and I still owned some until my recent general liquidation. It's a good diversification with beta=0.64 (PM's beta is even lower at 0.54) since cigarette sales won't be hurt by recession. MO's price is held down -- making the yield high -- out of fear of lawsuits or anti-tobacco legislation.
 
There is a white elephant in the room, which is to say, the wrong people are having kids. This is not too far away from a bunch of wannabe tough guys parading with Tiki torches and chanting "Jews will not replace us".

The wailing about economic realities and the rational choices it presents to young parents, misses the point. Elon and his crew have no interest improving circumstances which would make having more children a more appealing choice. What they want, but aren't willing to sacrifice to to obtain it, is a larger white working poor class. This would relieve them of the indignity of having to a van load of brown people stop by once a week to mow the lawn and trim the hedges.
 
TV and credit cards said:
Are they worried about a shrinking workforce? Shouldn't they be concerned about AI in the workplace? Isn't this going to hit us on a much shorter timeline? The top AI nerds say we will start to see this in as little as three years.
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Elon promotes AI so it cannot be a problem to him.
 
ZiprHead said:


Kids are expensive. Maybe if Republicans would stop taking benefits away from working class people so they can give tax breaks to the rich the working class might have more kids.
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People who have kids... they are called women. I guess is sounds worse if one says "women need to have more kids".

This isn't just Musk, this is a growing message from the alt-right. And they aren't particularly worried about Hispanic child birth rates.
 
Elon is promoting replacement theory. The birthrates he states are for uh "rich countries". He's concerned about the wrong people having all the kids but he is trying to coy about it.
 
Bronzeage said:
There is a white elephant in the room, which is to say, the wrong people are having kids. This is not too far away from a bunch of wannabe tough guys parading with Tiki torches and chanting "Jews will not replace us".

The wailing about economic realities and the rational choices it presents to young parents, misses the point. Elon and his crew have no interest improving circumstances which would make having more children a more appealing choice. What they want, but aren't willing to sacrifice to to obtain it, is a larger white working poor class. This would relieve them of the indignity of having to a van load of brown people stop by once a week to mow the lawn and trim the hedges.
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Someone with assets of only a quarter-billion or so is not in Musk's league; such a man may not even own a private jet or a super-yacht. But by the time one gets to Musk's level, material wants are satisfied and POWER -- specifically the power associated with wealth and income disparity -- is the goal. If automation means there aren't enough decent-wage jobs to go around in an over-populated world, that's a feature, not a bug, for Elon Musk and his ilk.

- - - - - - - - - -

I noticed that Bill Gates (one of Musk's fellow centibillionaires) thinks that only three careers will survive the current onslaught of automation and AI. I was curious what the three careers were -- would sex workers be one? -- so I clicked.

No sex workers. Biologists, energy experts, and programmers.
 
Only one of my kids has kids, and they have only one and will not have more. It is extremely expensive to have kids these days for a couple of reasons: health care and child care are extremely expensive! Plus a lot of young parents feel like they are letting their kids down if they do not have an Instagram or TikTok worthy lifestyle. My kids grew up with a hodge podge of bargain basement and garage sale bargains plus hand me downs and home mades and not needing to have every damn new toy and gee gaw in existence. They look at my middle class ( mostly) childhood and thought we were poor which would cause my parents so much shame and anger because we always had stable housing, food on the table, clothes on our backs, and a new car every two years ( job requirement for my dad) and a stay at home mom ( who did not want to be.). And we all went to college. My parents really made it, especially given their own childhood poverty.

Part of the issue is that raising children is extremely expensive now, compared with my childhood and my kids’ childhoods. Another part of the issue is that young adults today don’t have confidence that the world will still exist for their potential kids or that it will be worth living on the hellscape they envision for our future. They don’t believe they will ever be able to retire. And those are the educated middle to upper middle class kids!

From experience, I understand why more people without much money have more kids: sex is a lot cheaper than a dinner and a movie night out. Or drinks at a bar.

Also fewer babies are being made because of the amount of time invested in video games. I’m totally serious.
 
Swammerdami said:
I noticed that Bill Gates (one of Musk's fellow centibillionaires)
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Can we please stop abusing the poor centi- prefix?

A centimetre is one hundredth of a metre.

A centibillionaire would therefore have in the order of ten million dollars.

A hundred metres is a hectometre.

A person with hundreds of billions of dollars is therefore a hectobillionaire.

What the cent heck is so hard about this??
 
The estimates I have seen suggest that the population in the U.S. is expected to peak at around 380 million in 2080. This of course assumes we keep the current rate of immigration.

So we see what the hand wringers are actually worried about: They want less or no immigration, especially from those infamous brown countries, and want white people to reproduce more.
 
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