Birth rates have dropped 20% since 2007. I don't think we ever came back from the '08 crash. It's just been smoke and mirrors.
Birth rates have dropped 20% since 2007. I don't think we ever came back from the '08 crash. It's just been smoke and mirrors.
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It's already insufficient for maintaining population in half of the world and keeps falling further everywhere. Any socialist project would be forced to confront this issue or collapse in the long term. Capitalism is definitely choosing collapse.
Do we even need to maintain current population? Especially in the "half of the world" where it's declining? Not that I'm Malthusian, I think how society is organized is massively more important than its population, but a little gradual decrease in the "west" seems neutral to positive overall
Demographic collapse in the West would be a net good, because it would destroy Western military capabilities, but overall - no. Society should be able to maintain stable population. Population decline is hard to stop at 'optimal' level, and once population have declined below some level, complex economic and societal organization becomes too hard to maintain.
Also, another half of the world is going in the same direction, just several decades later. Iran, for example, has already birth rates below replacement rate. In fact, we can expect Earth's population to start declining in 10-20 years, and this decline would be accelerating.
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If we manage to stabilise world population at mid 70s level, it would be a great success TBH. Birth rate decline is accelerating and majority of population would be old people, who are able to work much less and require a lot more care, so the raw labour power would be much smaller. I bet all of the West would introduce euthanasia to deal with it.
Also, capitalism is working like shit, when the population is not growing, and if it begins to decline, it will crap itself much more than now, and it will accelerate decline even more, until this positive feedback results in either communism or agrarian traditionalism, and the latter currently seems more likely.
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It wouldn't for much longer, birth rates there decline too.
Yeah, but we are going to switch to population decline in 10-20 years.
We already have smaller global fertility rate and it continues to decline. Linear extrapolation and its consequences and so on.
Soviet Union and other socialist countries had only partial solution. In fact, we can look at Korea with DPRK having a 1.9 fertility rate (and this is already less than replacement rate) and RoK with 0.7 fertility rate (which is a complete disaster long term, and it keeps declining).