The world remains awash in surplus labor (look no further than the US economy, where there is still too many workers in the prime age working cohort versus jobs to push wages up to living wages in the aggregate). With that said, wages will eventually rise into the future as working age population cohort shrinks. Capitalism leveraged the surplus labor from the population boom, caused by women previously being less empowered to affirm reproductive choices, for immense shareholder returns over decades. This will end as populations shrink over decades as total fertility rates breach and continue past 1.0.
Surely there is enough accumulated capital to pay for the things you mention with higher wages as population pyramids shrink, no?
Broadly speaking, there is no demographic or fertility crisis; it is a socioeconomic system crisis. Could we make these systems more humane and conducive to family formation (and thereby encourage potentially higher fertility rates)? We could, but the choice is made not to, and system participants have responded rationally.
Unskilled labor yes there's a surplus, but many skilled industries face large shortages.
>Surely there is enough accumulated capital to pay for the things you mention with higher wage
Then hyperinflation will eat it up. And I'm not a finance guy but isn't a big portion of wealth just on paper? Hypothetically, Microsoft share price could go to 0.
And then stocks are owned by pension plans and state debt financing -- future debt that also requires constant new input, at some point wont many governments go bankrupt?
Some interesting details to consider that I haven't seen mentioned in the usual hn discussions.
eg. Cities failing, no revenue or employees to keep electric, water, sewer, police, etc., infrastructure funded.
The world remains awash in surplus labor (look no further than the US economy, where there is still too many workers in the prime age working cohort versus jobs to push wages up to living wages in the aggregate). With that said, wages will eventually rise into the future as working age population cohort shrinks. Capitalism leveraged the surplus labor from the population boom, caused by women previously being less empowered to affirm reproductive choices, for immense shareholder returns over decades. This will end as populations shrink over decades as total fertility rates breach and continue past 1.0.
Surely there is enough accumulated capital to pay for the things you mention with higher wages as population pyramids shrink, no?
Broadly speaking, there is no demographic or fertility crisis; it is a socioeconomic system crisis. Could we make these systems more humane and conducive to family formation (and thereby encourage potentially higher fertility rates)? We could, but the choice is made not to, and system participants have responded rationally.
Citations:
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/fertility-rate-of-world-pop...
https://ourworldindata.org/global-decline-fertility-rate
https://ourworldindata.org/world-population-growth-past-futu...
https://ourworldindata.org/population-simulation-tool
https://www.suerf.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/f_fa99ccdbe...
(podcast is aggressively pronatalist propaganda based on the panelists imho)
Unskilled labor yes there's a surplus, but many skilled industries face large shortages.
>Surely there is enough accumulated capital to pay for the things you mention with higher wage
Then hyperinflation will eat it up. And I'm not a finance guy but isn't a big portion of wealth just on paper? Hypothetically, Microsoft share price could go to 0. And then stocks are owned by pension plans and state debt financing -- future debt that also requires constant new input, at some point wont many governments go bankrupt?