The enlargement of the middle class has been the real factor as when you talk about a demographic transition, the timescale is far longer than we usually use. — ssu
Here I think both I and you have to be careful on just what the reasons are as it's a complex issue. If this would be the (only) case, then countries with free education and housing programs would have different statistics, but I'm not so sure they have. — ssu
The market mechanism ought to handle these kind of difficulties. Or then you use migrant labor as the UK did, which had political consequences in the form of a Brexit vote. — ssu
It doesn't look circular, and nor is it. — Bartricks
Well, although one will also be creating pleasures by procreating, those pleasures - most of them, anyway - do not seem deserved. — Bartricks
So, an act of human procreation can therefore be expected to create undeserved suffering and non-deserved pleasure. — Bartricks
I’m not sure how that tells the opposite story. It tells the same story. — NOS4A2
The depositors would have been bailed-out, the debt written-off (what needs to happen!!), — synthesis
Had they let the banks fail, nothing would have happened other than the system would had gone through a much needed re-set (as happened in Iceland). — synthesis
Yes, and as long as capitalists are willing to adapt, this is not a problem for them. — baker
I feel that the battle between capitalism vs socialism needs to be transformed altogether to meet the needs of humanity in the widest sense
possible. — Jack Cummins
Thank you? :wink: — ssu
The most important reason is that with prosperity and women joining the workforce people don't need offspring to take care of themselves when they are older. — ssu
More affluent people have had far less children than poorer people for a very long time. — ssu
I don't think this a problem for capitalism, the private ownership of industry, but for the monetary system and the financial system. — ssu
Also it's an obstacle for a pay-as-you-go social welfare system that would need to function correctly a growing population. — ssu
If the younger generations are smaller than previous ones means simply that more of that capital is inherited by them. — ssu
It's a problem for that business, but not for capitalism on the whole. One business fails, and another one flourishes. That's capitalism. — baker
But the consequences of not bailing out the banks would have been catastrophic, not just for the market, but for the entire country. And that of course was the scam. Banks provide an essential public service, and so cannot be allowed to fail.
— Kenosha Kid
That's total bullshit. This is what the politicians and bankers were telling everybody. I wonder why?? — synthesis
I think more people try to escape from socialist states than move to them. The Venezuelan refugee crisis and Cuban exodus give us reasons as to why this occurs. — NOS4A2
Which is still not a problem, as long as the capitalist aims to be proportionally/relatively wealthier than others.
Ie. for such a capitalist to be successful, wealthy means to have x-times more than others. Whether this means having 10 billion when others have 10,000, or whether this means having ten horses while others have one donkey. — baker
That's total bullshit. This is what the politicians and bankers were telling everybody. I wonder why?? — synthesis
Banks used to fail all the time (and good riddance to them). — synthesis
Among other things, robotization is a cause of this trend , which I think will only accelerate. — Joshs
I also think that, as a reflection of choices people make for their own benefit , it will benefit capitalist economies. The current panic-mongering among economist over
population decline is the result of relying on old and outdated models to understand the relationship between economic growth and population. — Joshs
If the worker pool contracts, rather than many people competing for the same jobs, you'll have corporations competing for the same workers, which drives up wages. This is already evident in some job roles in rapidly expanding industries, such as IT. There hasn't been a bad time to be a programmer ever, even after the dot-com bubble burst.
Likewise if you have less people to sell shit to, you have less profit. So from both ends, a contraction in the population is a contraction in the markets. — Kenosha Kid
I know, the problem is that the state cannot do such. — synthesis
Governments are great at taking money from other people and (doing whatever...good, bad, or indifferent), — synthesis
But, as we’ve seen, rather than reduce the welfare state or better focus its spending on an aging population, the welfare state will seek to protect itself and move to replace its declining labor force through policies such as immigration. — NOS4A2
Welfare states will certainly suffer from declining birth rates. — NOS4A2
The banks should have been allowed to fail in 2008. — synthesis
As long as there are so many people on the planet, there is no danger to capitalism. — baker
I'm not sure whether birthrates are just a symptom of that same problem - lack of resources does seem part of it, but it's not like it's a simple linear relationship. There also doesn't seem to be a direct correlation between the countries worst affected (which as far as I know are Japan and South Korea) and a certain kind of capitalist practice. There is clearly a cultural element playing into this. — Echarmion
I think the problem with birth rates might be less one of capitalism in theory, and more one of where capitalism has ended up in practice. — Echarmion
What I am reasonably confident of is that most people no longer implicitly trust that their children will have it better than they will. That "american dream", seems very much dead. And that has an obvious implication for having children. — Echarmion
I know what you want to say here, just want to note that capitalism has always been backed up by the state in practice. The idea that capitalism represents a free economy in opposition to the state is a myth. — Echarmion
I couldn't possible take offence from anything you have said. — synthesis
The point is that society is based on an infinite number of things going on at the same time. Nobody can understand this kind of complexity, yet proscribe solutions for it. — synthesis
I'm afraid that this is a matter of ideology.
How are people going to change their consumer habits if they don't first change their minds? — baker
State intervention prevented the market from cleaning-up much some the problem. Capitalism (like everything else) sucks when you massive corruption coupled with state intervention. — synthesis
Just the same, in the end I believe that the country with freer market will win-out in the long run. I am not sure anybody wants a poor environmental outcome, so the mistakes made (via greed/corruption) become self-correcting as the market figures it out and demands change. — synthesis
Here's the deal, freedom is ALWAYS the answer, be it in personal matters, matter of the state, or the economy. Allow people to make decisions and take responsibility for themselves. There are certainly needs for a state, but not so many. The last thing that is needed is somebody telling everybody what they need. This is when it starts to get ugly. — synthesis
If you look at the medium to long term, it seems pretty clear that capitalism (even though it is political corruption that causes most/if not all of the difficulties) is a system that provides the best life for the most people. — synthesis
No, they encouraged by state intervention, such as through subsidies for "green technology". — baker
The state, if it would be a moral agent acting morally, would intervene with 1. this demand, and 2. the response of corporations to it. — baker
Except that the damage is done elsewhere on the planet. Parts of Chile, Bolivia, and Argentina are destroyed in the process of producing lithium for batteries for electric cars. — baker
"Hey, BLM - there's no genocide being committed by the police." — counterpunch
The point of the market "being in control" is that it can react much quicker (and with a great deal more accuracy) to the needs of all concerned. — synthesis
Even systems are (and need to) change constantly. The problem with social planning is that it cannot predict what changes will take place and therefore socialist systems accumulate errant plan after errant plan until the whole thing comes crashing down. — synthesis
The point of the market "being in control" is that it can react much quicker (and with a great deal more accuracy) to the needs of all concerned. — synthesis
Progressives have it right when they see the need for change, but they have it wrong when they believe that they know what the change needs to be. — synthesis
That would be natural selection at its finest. — baker
For whom? Says who? — baker
You're a left wing, political correctness ideologue. It's a dogma you cling to despite the fact communism has failed, and repeatedly run to genocide - despite me showing you that the anti-capitalist, eco commie approach to sustainability can't work, and despite me showing you the many obvious hypocrisies of political correctness. — counterpunch
So, having reflected and the way in which material possibly is more ambiguous, do you think my question would have been of a different nature, from your point of view if it it has been posed as is the physical world the absolute reality? — Jack Cummins
I'm not here to make friends. — counterpunch
True, which is why I’m not against markets, nor against privately owned means of products per se, but against concentration of the means of production into few hands, such that some people own more than they themselves use, and others own none and instead use the unused excess that others own — Pfhorrest
If I punch a wall in frustration at just how stupid some people can be, then that will cause me some suffering. But that suffering seems to be of a non-deserved kind. — Bartricks
And then there's all the suffering we humans inevitably visit on others, not least other animals, in the course of our lives. All of that is undeserved suffering. And there's a lot of it. And it's very morally bad. — Bartricks
True. But what renders a certain configuration as "informational" is something external to the configuration itself. — Pantagruel
Even if you are talking about physical entropy, some states may be more "improbable" than others, but that is a long way from containing meaningful information. — Pantagruel
No, I didn't mean to say that it does. — Echarmion
And that's why I was saying there seem to be two contradictory statements which both seem obviously and necessarily true. I did not mean to imply that there are no solutions to this problem, only that it seems at the heart of the philosophical problem. — Echarmion
Sure, I get what you're saying. But I feel like the best way to resolve the dilemma is a compatibilist one. I consider my experience as if it was a true representation of a material world, but at the same time I take seriously my own experience of myself as an acting subject. — Echarmion