this post was submitted on 21 Dec 2024
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Please explain why this is obvious. Less people seems more sustainable, not less.
The two biggest issues off the top of my head are rural towns in Japan will continue to lose population and completely disappear, and there won't be enough young working people paying into health care and social funds to support the old non-working population. I think there are a lot of other major negative impacts Japan will face as a country but I'm just not that knowledgable on the subject.
I assume we just have fundamentally different views on this topic because I really wish humanity would change to a more scientific and explorative approach entirely, where we expand outward into space and become a multi-planetary species, which will need a huge sustained population growth to support. I assume you don't support that.
We need to inhabit at least one other plant on a continuous basis before we encourage exponential population growth.
We are going to be resource constrained on this planet long before we expand to others.
It's not obvious. Low birth rates are completely sustainable, you just kill anyone who can't afford to retire and can't work anymore, and society functions perfectly well.
We have machines that can do the work of 100 people in the past
I'm sure that we could make it work without killing anyone
We also consume bullshit at 100 times the rate. People will be unhappy to see that go away. But yes, we produce more than enough for everyone as is.
While the alternative is everyone who is unable to wotk is killed anyway by the apathy of the system?
We are doing what you are describing already, in the system we currently live in.
What? In the current system we pay retired people money based on past employment as well as just for living long enough, in most countries. Japan can no longer do that soon because without taxing their young to poverty, they just don't have enough income to fund it.
Old people can’t work and need someone to pay for their retirement.
If there are more old people than young people (population pyramid wrong way round) every young person needs to pay a crapton of taxes so that old folks don’t starve to death
Nah. Food is cheap and plentiful. We don't need young people working in fields for old people to be fed.
Why can't immigration replace births?
Because Japan doesn’t do that.
There is an -ism they’re pretty big on, it starts with R
Okay, but then we can't just frame the discussion as "increase birth rates or society collapses" because there's a very obvious third option that they aren't taking.
They apparently don't do procreation, either.